Recently, I posted a selection of newspaper fulminations about falling standards, some of them almost a hudred years old.

Here is another one, taken from Scientific American, March 8, 1862, page 146.  The introduction tells us that the piece was lifted from some other journal, and the context makes it clear the journal was British.

The Barbarism of Steel Pens.

I am aware, says a recent writer, that it may be very fairly said that if a man is green enough to be induced by any representations of seller or advertiser, to make his coffee with a windlass, and shave himself with a stone, the only verdict he can expect from an intelligent jury is "served him right;" but look at another invention, under the tyranny of which we all groan more or less, but which very few have the strength of mind to resist. Has not the curse of steel pens swept over the land until decent handwriting (sic!) is almost unknown? Do not ninety-nine persons in a hundred use steel pens, and has more than one out of the ninety-nine the effrontery to say he can write with them? Lord Palmerston was quite right—the handwriting of this generation is abominable; and as new improvements in steel pens go on, that of the next will be worse. The fine Roman hand of the last century has died out; the steel can’t do it. There is neither grace nor legibility in the angular scrawl that prevails now. Open any parish register of fifty years back, and see in what a fine legible hand, and scholar-like too in most cases, the parson of that day made his entries. Our present young parson, though he took a first-class at Oxford, and wears a most correct waistcoat, doesn’t do it, and couldn’t do it if his benefit of clergy depended on it.

The dropping of standards seems to be a perennial complaint!

 

Yesterday, I got an alert that somebody was following me on Twitter.  It was a female name, not quite as blatant as Fifi LaBoom, but trending that way.  I think it was Louella something, but I ditched the notification when I found what it was.

It might have been genuine, but I doubted it.  I always look first before reciprocating, and in this case I found that young Fifi was following some 700 people and had three followers.

That struck me as an unexpected ratio on Twitter, where people typically follow twice as many as follow them, or if they are pack leaders, have more followers than people they follow.  I also noted the explicit language Fifi used, and suspected that all was not as it appeared.

To check my suspicions looked at one of "her" links.  It was to a page of ladies with varying degrees of wardrobe malfunction or deficiency.  Suffice it to say that young Fifi, probably a 120 kg mafioso in a dingy street in Vladivostok, is now blocked.

Clever people, these smut merchants: in 1859, Charles Baudelaire complained that pornographers were already exploiting the new technique of photography, and I'm now trying to think of any technology since cave painting that they haven't jumped into as early adopters of explicit sexuality.

Think of Wainewright the Poisoner, a man convicted of forgery and transported to Van Diemen's Land (even though everybody 'knew' that he had done far worse), who made a living painting scenes of sexual activity.

Think of literature sent "under plain wrapper".

Think of the car, where "back seat" does not make one think first of back seat drivers.

Think of the "adventuresses" who travelled on river boats (at least in the US).

Think of phone sex.

Think of the Mile-High Club.

Sex was widely used from the 1880s to sell lawn mowers.

I suspect the microwave oven may be the only stand-out. 

If I asserted that the world was flat, and a politician heard me, would he then demand that scientists explain why it wasn't before we launched a satellite?  An idiot who shall remain nameless has just burst onto the airwaves with his news that a conference he attended was told that solar flares account better for global warming, so before we do anything, the scientists have some explaining to do.

Yeah, right, Nero, and we'll keep the fire brigade in reserve, will we, until we know that Rome's really burning? What's that? You want them to come along to your violin performance?  OK . . .

Sorry, we return now to our transmission.

Kurt Lambeck had some strong things to say about the global warming "sceptics" in Ockham's Razor, and you can read them at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2009/2589206.htm#transcrip..., but I have to wonder why uninformed twits like the unnamed polly feel that they have a democratic right to deny the science, simply because a half-baked idiot denied the science.

As Luis Alvarez, no mean scientist himself, commented once: "There is no democracy in physics.  We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi."  Mind you, Alvarez was talking about physics among physicists.  I hate to think what he would have to say about the polly wanting to derail everything just because he's been conned by snake oil merchants.

I think the polly feels free to thump his tub and posture in public because so many of the uninformed, the unwashed and the unwary (i.e., people like him) subscribe to the view that all scientists are mad scientists.  If you can dismiss scientists as mad, then you may feel free to call into question the careful, but often hard-to-understand views of the scientists.  The world is flat, you muppet, anybody can see that, and if you don't, you must be mad!

So: are there mad scientists?

If you are a forensic psychiatrist in a secure unit, you are bound to seek an outlet for your creativity.  Around you, psychotic patients are pursuing the patenting of their inventions for inflatable moon buggies and the like, and it occurred to David James and Paul Gilluley that the British Patent Office might be a repository of psychotic ideas, so they went on a trawl.

Oddly, they were unable to find evidence of mad inventors, but they nonetheless described their experiences.  The abstract is at http://pb.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/abstract/21/12/764 -- if you go there, you can download the PDF of James, David V. and Paul L. Gilluley, Psychotic patients and patent applications: The mad scientist revisited?, Psychiatric Bulletin (1997) 21: 764-768.

The authors surveyed unusual patents and authors with unusual track records, but found nothing as odd as what their patients wished to patent.  Unabashed, they wallowed in nutty inventions, and later, shared the tastes, sights and sounds.  Their conclusion: "the only creative 'mad scientists' are those who were creative scientists before they became mentally ill".  I was glad to read that.

Definitely recommended for a few light moments, and even a bit of serious introspection.

I am getting interested in barometers at the moment, as part of the research for a new book. It was a chance thing that began with finding 19th century references to leeches as indicators of the weather, and I'll come back to those later.

This morning, I chanced on this 1863 magazine article about James Joule:

A Mechanical Barometer.

An unique barometer for measuring small atmospheric disturbances, has recently been devised by Dr. Joule, of Manchester, England. It consists of a large glass carboy connected by a glass tube with a miniature gasometer, formed by inserting a small platinum crucible over a small vessel of water. The crucible is attached to the short end of a finely-suspended lever, multiplying its motion six times. When the apparatus was raised two feet the index moved through one inch; hence he was able in serene weather to observe the effect corresponding to the elevation of less than one inch.

The barometer is placed in a building, the slated roof of which affords, without perceptible draught, free communication with the external atmosphere. In this situation it was found that the slightest wind caused the index to oscillate, a gale occasioning oscillations of two inches, an increase of pressure being generally observed when the gusts took place. This barometer is undoubtedly very sensitive, and is highly spoken of amongst scientific circles in Manchester. It will however, of course, only show relative pressure, not absolute, as the indications would vary as much, or even more, by an Increase or diminution of temperature.

I'm still trying to puzzle out how that works, how it might be used, and what happened to it. That's my period, and I thought I knew just about all there was to be knowed about gadgets and such from the 19th century.

Still, the leeches were unknown to me as well.  They were written up in an 1854 article:

Leeches and their behaviour used to predict the weather:

A correspondent of the “Philadelphia North American” gives an interesting description of an ingenious instrument, contrived by Dr. Merryweather of Yorkshire, Eng., the great working principle of which is founded on the sensitiveness of leeches to the changes of the weather. It is well known that leeches confined in a bottle partly filled with water, are accustomed, previous to a storm, to rouse from their sluggishness and exhibit signs of extraordinary perturbation. They will swim in all directions, and rising one after another to the top of the water, commence climbing the side of the bottle."

Availing himself of this time-honored custom among leeches, Dr. Merryweather arranged a number of bottles on a stand, each containing a leech and a metallic tube of a particular form, covered with shellac varnish, so that no metal could come in contact with the animal.— When a change in the weather was about to take place, the leeches would crawl into this metallic tube, and in so doing displace a small piece of whalebone which was arranged so as to partially close the opening. To this whalebone was attached a wire, which, passing upward through the mouth of the bottle, connected with the hammer of a bell, so that whenever the leeches were influenced by the electro-magnetic state of the atmosphere to ascend the tube, notice of the fact would be promptly transmitted to the ears of their master.

But it is not absolutely necessary that every one should have such a finished apparatus as that of Dr. Merryweather. On board of vessels it would only be necessary to keep a few leeches in a bottle, placed in some prominent place where the lookout could occasionally examine their movements, and the necessary warning be conveyed in ample time.

Dr. Merryweather seems to have tested his invention fairly. For an entire year (1850) he wrote to the president of the Philosophical Society of Whitby, accounts of the storm indications of his leeches; and in no instance did they prove incorrect. If these results are verified by other observations, a leech barometer may be deemed an indispensable appendage to every ship and every household.

All of these and many other gems can be found in the online Cornell University archive of Scientific American, covering 1846 to 1869, located at http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/browse.journals/scia.html — this link lets you search, browse or poke around. It's a rich interface, and it repays some fiddling time to get to used to all of the bells and whistles.

And now, back to curious 19th century cures for cholera. After that, back to the leeches, and the 19th century Australian export trade in leeches to Europe.  As early as the 1840s, W. A. leeches were being exported to Mauritius, but I don't know why.  Not yet, anyhow.

Many moons ago, I was a teenager in New Guinea, working in what we would call "work experience" today. I was in the jungle near Sogeri, and though I didn't realise it at the time, it became good background for the history of the Kokoda campaign that I wrote for younger readers, several years back. It helped me in another way, because we used a "chain", by then a steel tape, to measure distances.

In Port Moresby, I was shown a tellurometer, though I never saw one operating. I was told that in the near future, chaining would be a thing of the past, but the basic methods we used were far more hands-on.  They were little changed from the methods used by explorers and surveyors in the 19th century, so that helped me when it came to writing histories of that sort of work.

It's hard to relate to that now, in an era when the truth of plate tectonics can be established by GPS measurements on ground stations.  Even recent advances whizz by so fast that we tend to miss them, as a US friend observed the other day:

"[My dad] kept reminding me that he was working on the Atlas missile program and the controls were all in a trailer bigger than his 5th wheel and didn't have as much computing power as Liz's graphing calculator.  It's pretty awesome to think that we could have sent men to the moon with less computing capacity than I'm carrying around in my purse."

Well, the tellurometer was good, but grab this, from a release I saw the other day, relating to a story in Nature Photonics*:

"By combining the best of two different distance measurement approaches with a super-accurate technology called an optical frequency comb, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have built a laser ranging system that can pinpoint multiple objects with nanometre precision over distances up to 100 kilometres. The novel LIDAR (for 'light detection and ranging') system could have applications from precision manufacturing lines on Earth to maintaining networks of satellites in perfect formation, creating a giant space-based platform to search for new planets."

LIDAR is a bit like radar: it sends out a flash then detects and analyzes the reflection, updating distances to multiple reference points every 200 microseconds (to get your head around that, it means 5000 times a second!). Now LIDAR has an "ambiguity range", and it has trouble distinguishing between two distances separated by this range. The new system has an ambiguity range of around 1.5 metres, so all the opoerators have to do is use GPS or some other method which gives you a close enough measure to tell you which of the competing measures to accept.

So, we can measure the disrances between mountains incredibly accurately but what else can we do? We can launch a bunch of satellites to fly "in formation" at very precise distances, measured by LIDAR. These, says the release, could form images of "black holes with multiple X-ray telescopes on different satellites, and support tests of general relativity through measurements of satellite spacing in a gravitational field".

LIDAR may also be used in automated manufacturing, where many parts need to fit together with tight tolerances, the developers say. This is always the crucnh point in press releases: some of them make ambit claims about "shows promise as a cure for cancer" while others miss the boat by not seeing where the real applications may lie.  Recall that Frank Whittle conceived of the jet engine as a power unit for fighters, and not for the jets that criss-cross the world each day, carrying SARS, swine flu and tourists from place to place.

I would like to be around for another fifty years to see what LIDAR ends up doing, but that won't happen. That's why I spend my days burrowing through 19th century science, where I can look to see what became of this or that greatly praised invention, like putting sulfur in your socks to ward off cholera, but that's another story.

* I. Coddington, W. C. Swann, L. Nenadovic and N. R. Newbury. Rapid, precise absolute distance measurements at long range. Nature Photonics. Published online May 24, 2009.

Yes, I know—it's annoying when you see a typo like "stanards", but as we get older, we tend to fuss more about such things.  Rest assured: it was deliberate, a bit like running one's finger-nails down the blackboard (yes, I'm an old teacher).

I want to offer a set of newspaper clippings that I assembled, some little time ago.  I used to draft rude letters for an exalted personage, and we were always getting whinges about falling standards.

It was suggested to me that I should employ a well-known quote, variously attributed to Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Cicero and others (my money would be on Cicero, but that's another story).  It goes like this:

"The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect to their elders.... They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and are tyrants over their teachers."

"The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for girls, they are forward, immodest and unwomanly in speech, behaviour and dress."

If you are ever tempted to quote this, please be aware that it is almost certainly bogus. What follows is the Real McCoy.


1.  At a recent examination . . . only 40 per cent of those who presented themselves secured a pass.  This is a truly deplorable reflection of the examination system, which after all these years, and at the expenditure of an enormous amount of public money, has thus shown itself totally incapable of teaching the simple requirements of reading, writing and arithmetic . . . If the instruction imparted at our schools is so lamentably defective that it merely turns out pupils so shamefully inefficient that they are unable to undertake even humble clerical duties, what in the name of goodness is it that the scholars do to learn to equip them for anything better?

***************
2.  Inspectors complain of the English which they do or do not find in the primary schools. Reading lacks fluency and expression; articulation is defective . . . Spelling has not reached a high standard . . . Grammar is the bugbear of most teachers and children . . . Even writing has not reached the satisfactory stage. "Back to the 3Rs" will be the necessary slogan if improvement does not soon show up.

***************
3.  Half the girls leaving school nowadays can't wash up the breakfast dishes, cook an egg, fry a chop, or wash their own stockings. But they can turn out coloured drawings that would make a cow bilious, and can do eurhythmic stunts like a professional dancer. But they can't do three messages without making a mistake in the change, while an attempt to peel a potato drives their parents to tears.

And the boys - they can't break up a fruit case for the copper fire, knock in a nail to hang up a cheap calendar, or be entrusted with two orders for the butcher. But they can talk wireless like a scientist, discuss psycho-analysis, and play handball 14 hours a day.

A lot of expensive faddism has crept into our education system, and the things that they will be called upon to do every day of their lives, they cannot do.

***************
4.  Can pupils who attend the primary and secondary schools of the State spell properly? Is sufficient time devoted to the subject, and are the methods employed effective?

Many people interested in the intellectual development of the rising generation maintain that, judging by the examples of spelling which come under their notice, the answers must be given in the negative.

***************
5.  After the introduction of a spelling list into primary schools, there was considerable informal discussion of the effect on the standards of spelling. As objective evidence of any change would be of value to the Curriculum Committee, the Director-General (on May 1 1951) approved an investigation to compare spelling standards with those of five and sixteen years earlier. To summarise the views expressed there was a general, but not a unanimous, feeling that a drop in standards had occurred which was especially evident as mis-spellings in written expression.

Now here are the sources:

1:         Truth, 9 September 1915.
2:         Brisbane Daily Standard, 4 October 1917
3:         Truth, 24 December, 1924
4:         Telegraph, 27 August 1930
5:         Research and Curriculum Branch, Bulletin No. 6, 1952

But wait, there's more!

Here are some more comments on how society is going to bits, items that I dug out last week. This time, teh sources are attached.


ALBANY BOYS'.

This school makes steady and satisfactory progress. More attention - has been paid, during the last year to the lower standards. The arithmetic of the second and third standards is still deficient. Very few scholars provide their own books, using instead the free stock originally intended only for children receiving gratuitous instruction.

The Western Australian Times Tuesday 27 August 1878

http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/2979729

***************
BIG DECLINE SEEN IN MORAL STANDARDS

The value placed on chastity has undergone a bewildering change in our time; and promiscuity and pre-marital experiences were regarded "tolerantly by an increasing number of young people," said Dr. Irene Sebire, Child Guidance Clinic director, at Blackfriars, Sydney, speaking at the summer school of the, Australian Institute of Political Science.

"The family to-day is passing through a crisis-which many feared it might not manage to survive," she said.

The Canberra Times Tuesday 30 January 1951

http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/2818592

***************
"I do not know whether something is wrong with our social standards, or whether it is because of defective education, but we cannot close our eyes to the fact that drink is, consumed in enormous quantities in excess of that required for refreshment."

The Canberra Times Thursday 17 February 1927

http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/1211113

So next time a mate starts rabbiting on about the awful younger people, just remember that people once said the same about us!

I have emerged from four months of writing YA historical fiction, satisfied that I can do fiction, but not satisfied that I can do historical fiction. The problem is that I am an exacting task master, and if I don't watch out, the result will be too didactic, too preachy, too teachy. I'm going to leave it and come back to it later.

So I have turned to the next task on the slab, which happens to be about ingenuity and the trouble people get into. This has taken me to a nice new place to trawl, one which doesn't seem to have been announced anywhere: http://www.google.com/patents

This searches US patents (maybe there are others, but I have yet to see any) in a variety of ways, including just a search by number if you have it from another source.

Among other things, I have found 90298, "An improvement in privy-seats", in the form of a seat made of rollers to foil people standing on it.  Hmmmmm. If that fails to elicit a similar reaction in you, how about a tapeworm trap that you bait and lower down your throat on a piece of string . . . then haul up again, once you have a tapeworm wriggling on the line. That is 11942.

I am still trying to track down the device I mentioned, having lifted it from another book, used by "gentlemen" on railways in the late 19th century, consisting of a tube that strapped to the leg and delivered it to the floor.  I have found such a device that was for the incontinent, but it is of too late a date.  Still, I have a curiosity, located in patent 501372.

There are some truly strange patents out there, as well as simple curiosities like the first ever pocket protector, patented in 1903.  I think I'm going to enjoy this one.

Not a lot of science in this: it's more of a note to file, proof that I haven't fallen off my perch.

As I think I have already noted, I am deep in a series of Young Adult historical fiction with a scientific bias, set in Australia in the period 1852 to 1864. I am working hard at getting a sense for the era across, within a series of adventures. That means showing how ordinary Australians fared and thought.

Along with most decent Australians who know their Australian history, I have a deep contempt for the 'boy commissioners'. These were the 19th century whey-faced poltroons and loons, the discards of the British aristocracy, adjudged incompetent by their peers, pun intended, who, from having been born to rule, were judged well-suited for the colonies, like Hilaire Belloc's Lord Lundy, who was dressed down by his grandsire, the Duke, thusly:

"Sir! you have disappointed us!
We had intended you to be
The next Prime Minister but three:
The stocks were sold; the Press was squared:
The Middle Class was quite prepared.
But as it is! . . . My language fails!
Go out and govern New South Wales!"

Far be it from me to draw any parallels with members of the Royal Family who seek to become Governor-General of Australia, using Australia as crash-test dummies while they learn how to be a figurehead!

I think I may have acquired this attitude from reading Manning Clark, but imagine my surprise, recently, to find Clark praising one of these normally chinless, witless, gormless types when, at the age of 21, he told Governor Latrobe how to sort the problems being encountered on the gold fields at Bendigo.

So as one does, I turned to the Australian Dictionary of Biography to learn more of Joseph Anderson Panton. I found him at http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A050451b.htm and made the most amazing discovery: the way in which he was selected for his post, and here we have his own account.

The man stood "A good deal over six feet", and apparently was solid as well. When he applied for a post as an officer on the Gold Escort, La Trobe examined him.

'The Lieutenant-Governor looked me up and down, and then remarked jocularly "This fellow seems too big for a trooper. Too heavy. It would be too severe on the horses. I think he would make a Commissioner".'

Is this the reverse of the Tall Poppy syndrome?

Although I am no longer actively involved in education, old habits die hard, and I keep my ear to the ground. This is just one of the things I have in common with dead wombats. And, I suppose, dead teachers (and I used to be a member of the Dead Teachers' Society, but that's another story).

Over the years, I have become largely immune to the teacher-Luddites, the absolutely determined rejectors of technology. You can tell from a certain shrillness in their tone that their real problem is that they are terrified of what they see before them.

Well, I can relate to that. I have managed to take on board a number of the more recent inventions of the Web, but when I look at my Web pages, they lack a certain modernity. I could probably sit down and make them more funky, but one site (about 'different' tourism) draws 100,000 visitors each year, and a science site for kids pulls in half a million a year, so I just leave them alone. They ain't broke, so why fix them?

I download podcasts, but I don't use RSS, and I don't VOIP or Skype either, mainly because it will take time away from writing, and I'm pretty busy right now. Colour me verging on the Luddite.

Mind you, I don't think I'll ever be a real Luddite or even a good facsimile of one. Tradition has it that the Luddites, around 1810, took their name from a chap who may have been Ned Ludd or Ned Ludlam. Or maybe he didn't exist, but if he did, he came from near Leicester, and apparently he broke two stocking frames in a fit of rage. The Luddites broke machines because they threatened people's work, which was a bit different.

The modern Luddites don't break machines, but when they try to use computers, they break the hearts of techies.

"My computer's got a virus," they scream.

Techie: "Why do you say that?"

Luddite: "It won't open my file!"

Techie: "What did you create the file in?"

Luddite (long-sufferingly at this silly question): "Microsoft!".

Assorted deities including Erudite, the goddess of smarty-pantses, willing, I won't ever be like that.

But the big problem with some Luddites is that they ooze into management, perhaps by clerical error, and somebody tells them to mend their ways and mind their manners and get with the flow. All of a sudden, the Luddite becomes a fervent exponent of all things technological. In a way, they remind me of George Orwell's sheep in 'Animal Farm'.

Remember them? The animals, symbols of the proletariat, chanting "Four legs good, two legs bad," and later, other variations of that. The reformed Luddites, the anti-Luddites, have their own chant "Old ways bad, new ways good", and they target, in particular, that evil old technology, The Book.  It's simple enough for them to think that they understand the concept.

Now I always found it amusing that when Marshall McLuhan decided the book was dead, he wrote several books to prove it. The modern anti-Luddites seem, for some reason, to be somewhat illiterate, so they don't write books. They just attack them with a vehemence that would not have been out of place in the Opernplatz (now the Bebelplatz) in Berlin, one May night in 1933, when some truly charming people burnt books.

I need a new name for them, though. These people aren't really anti-Luddites, they are inverted, backward Luddites. If the Luddites are followers of Ned Ludd, then these people must be the followers of Ned Dull. Hereafter, they shall be Dullards.

The Dullards have two main lines of argument:

"We don't need books: you can get everything on the Internet."

"Books go out of date, and then we have to throw them out."

I answered the first of these silly claims in a talk on the ABC, early last year, a talk you can find at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2008/2151433.htm   In essence, I argued that making a book involves a lot more than blogging or emailing does. There is an art and a craft to shaping a book, writing it, editing it and designing it. There is a huge difference between knocking up a web page or five, and creating the sustained narrative that is a book. Well, I would say that, because I write books, quack the Dullards.  I, on the other hand, have a first-hand knowledge of the research, the sweat, the tears, the revisions and the efforts of professional editors and designers that go into my books.

Yes, books can go out of date, or some of them can, especially computer manuals and the like, and the savvy reader checks for the date of publication, which appears on the back of the title page.

Very few web pages have a date on them (all of mine do), and there is no guarantee of quality in a web page. A reputable publisher normally will have done at least a cursory check for quality, so there is some sort of implied guarantee in a book, most of the time*. Look at http://www.allaboutexplorers.com/explorers/ and then look again more closely. Click on the link "For teachers" if you still don't get it. That's right, the whole site is dodgy, and while this one has been created as a warning, people get taken in.

I know. I invented the town of Cootaburra and put it on the web, and over the years, my tall tale of a non-existent town and its fanciful Giant Dung Beetle has appeared in newsletters, a government report, at least two books and one magazine, as well as a number of educational sites. Just search on Cootaburra and see for yourself. Just stay clear of the ones at Tripod, which have been flagged as attack sites that distribute malware. Yep, that's right, a few web sites can be downright dangerous. Books don't do that (except, perhaps, Marie Curie's lab notebooks at the Sorbonne, even now so radioactive that would-be readers have to sign away any right to sue, and those aren't published books).

So the Internet can be downright wrong, it's generally not self-correcting, you can't tell if it's up-to-date and it may even cause active harm, but does this upset the Dullards? Not a bit of it: they are hell-bent on getting rid of books and replacing the useless books with gleaming new technology.  Only in this way can they demonstrate their incisive brilliance, their sterling qualitiies of lleadership.

Given a choice between barbarians at the gate and Dullards at the gate, give me the barbarians, any day. You can reason with barbarians and even civilise them with time.  Barbarians rape and pillage, but once they've gone, the pieces are still there, so you can start again.

Occasionally, a Dullard emerges who has slipped through the ranks to Senior Management and becomes a principal who can make educational decisions without being educated. They don't just do away with books, these special Dullards, they do away with librarians and leave readers bereft of guidance, at the mercy of any devious snake-oil seller with a glib yarn about giant dung beetles. I'm still working on a special name for that sub-class of Dullard.

No, not that. Or that.  Or that.  I want something I can use in a family-values blog.

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* It was my then publisher who published and was caught out by the Helen Demidenko hoax. I recall this, because I had written a novel that was a transparent hoax at three levels, a literary joke that would have amused but never fooled, pretty much as detectable as Cootaburra. I submitted the ms just as the Demidenko business was coming apart, and got a frosty rejection which I understood when the scandal all came out. The ms is still in my filing cabinet, and I take it out occasionally and whimper sadly at its unhappy fate.

 

 

I said in the last piece that I would explain what has been keeping me busy. Here, among other things, is the story of the SPLATs, but a few other things as well.  Life has been interesting!

I see that Anna Bligh is about to launch a full-on technology blitz in her campaign in Queensland. There will be a blog, a Twitter stream of tweets (I'll come back to what that is in a moment), MySpace, FaceBook, Flickr and more.

MySpace and FaceBook seem to be well-known now, and Flickr is just a system for putting and sharing photos on the web, but Twiiiter is probably worth a few moments, if only because I have been using it today as a tool to further science education, but we'll come to that as well in due course.

Twittering can be done from a specialised piece of software, by a link through a browser, or even from your mobile phone, and when it settles down, it will probably be used mainly to share ideas. In the past couple of weeks, I have been keeping up on the Victorian fires from short messages on Twitter (called 'Tweets') which HAVE to be succinct.

The limit for a Tweet is 140 characters, but that is enough for me, for example, to express amazement that CERN would get Tom Hanks to "switch on" the Large Hadron Collider, because he is the star of a silly film of a fatuous Dan Brown book that is partle set at the LHC, along with the URL for a web site that gives more details.

The people who see this are people who have elected to "follow" me, while I see posts from people I have elected to follow. You find out about new people by hearing about them, back-tracking on replies to them from people you follow, of when somebody says in a blog that I use the handle "McManly" -- that is also my alias with Flickr and LiveJournal, so it is a fairly transparent alias, and the next build of my website will include the information that I hide behind that name.

A few new users complain about the brevity requirement, but it is old hat to me. About three years ago, I started building a set of "big ideas of science". I decided that each would be 160 characters or less, stand on its own legs and describe what scioentists believe. I do have cascades and chains of what I dubbed SPLATs, but in the last couple of weeks, I have been frantically packaging these to go up on the web. You can see them at http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis@ozemail.com.au/scifun/splats.htm

This has been inextricably linked with Twittering, because the impetus to get them on the web came from a twitter exchange with an interesting young science teacher, Bronwen Eady by name, who is working on a science education website, that you can find at http://captaincuriosity.net/teacher-lab/

I found her when a mutual friend posted a tweet drawing people's attention to that site, where she has just started to post trial pieces, testing the format, which is almost as demanding as writing a SPLAT in 160 characters, or a Tweet in 140.

We are working on complementary tasks: she is seeking to present simple activities, neatly packaged after careful testing, each one occurring as a PDF file that other teachers can use and print. I am trying to present teachers with a package of propositions that they can pass to students so they can test them, chase them down burrows or whatever.

I realised, when I looked at Bronwen's first drafts, that she could probably use the SPLATs as a base from which to grab ideas for activities.  When I mentioned them, she encouraged me to get my act together, as I now have. If you care about science, and you have grandchildren, it might not hurt to look at my SPLATs, but it will most certainly be worth your while looking at Bronwen's Teacher Lab. You may not want to use the sheets as such, but show them to teachers you know.

What I suggest to grandparents is that the simple idea of looking at reflections in spoons is easy to share with a grandchild.  A lot of the joy and wonder has gone out of children's lives, and simple play like this can put it back again.  I would never have known about it if I had not been persuaded to play with Twitter.

I suspect that Twitter may be one of the last applications that I take to my heart, and I am yet to be convinced that it is worth persevering with, but it certainly served as a remarkable tool in this instance.  Of course, when I express reservations about a new tool, I risk ending up looking like Sir William Preece, who was Chief Engineer in teh British Post Office.  Preece said, according to legend, "The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys."

Perhaps, in the end, we will all find Twitter indispensable, once people get past tweeting about what they had for breakfast. But that said, I probably know more about the status of the fires in Victoria this afternoon than the news media do at this time.