She's stopped stooping?

According to the Forestry Commission (Massive survey probes the secrets of Britain's forests- August 26, 2009) there are now 2.75 million hectares of woodland covering 12% of Great Britain (about twice as much as in the early 20th century). This is not necessarily a great advance for society since the Forestry Commission (especially in the early years of its life) had a tendency to plant dead areas of monoculture (single species), including conifers which acidified the land. But it's probably better to have more tress than less. Certainly one of the best things about the London Borough of Waltham Forest (where I live) is the large number of trees (perhaps more than any other London borough).
But all is not well in the world of at least one tree species. Following in the wake of Dutch Elm's Disease another alien tree exterminator seems to be doing its worse: the leaf miner moth which attacks conker trees. Like the most recent financial crisis, this moth originated in Greece. There is no cure for it (hopefully unlike the financial crisis) and it has already infected one in two horse chestnut trees. According to the Royal Horticultural Society there soon won't be a single conker tree in Britain that doesn't suffer from the pest.
The moth doesn't kill trees but it does weaken them and make them more liable to suffer disease like bleeding canker, which kills trees.
It comes at just the wrong time because the kids have stopped playing conkers and an apparently healthy tree a few yards from my home is producing large quantities of crop but the local kids are just letting them lie on the ground until they rot or get swept up by the road sweeper. Is this a double wammy for the conker? Will it be lost as a result of a combination of an incurable alien invader and a lack of demand? Well, probably not. Most of these species manage to cling on somewhere (an isolated location or an island), ready to re-populate the mainland when there is an opportunity. But count on one thing: there will be fewer people stooping to conker in the next few decades.

I was wrong

About ten years ago I got the idea that companies were going to need videos for their web sites since people were unlikely to put up with wading through reams of type and would prefer to see moving pictures. If a national group had 100 local outlets then each one should have a couple of minutes of video to personalise them and introduce potential customers to the branch.

At the time the video production companies were not geared up to do this sort of work since they needed thousands of pounds to work on a job, whereas most small companies would probably only be able to pay hundreds. My idea was to do the job for about the price of a page advert in a trade magazine, perhaps £750.

Since then there has been an explosion in the number of companies offering to produce video and now some are advertising a £500 package, cheaper than the bargain basement price I envisaged a decade ago. Yet few companies have videos on their web sites. There doesn't seem to be much work out there.

Potential customers also seem to want a more polished and professional video than I imagined. But it is polished and professional in the style that they saw on tv 20 or 30 years ago. It's not what the professionals are doing now!

It seems to me that so long as the universities continue to run vast numbers of film production schools and there are relatively few opportunities in the shrinking tv and film industries, the situation will get more competitive. Not less.

As an aside, it seems doubly daft for universities to run film production or journalism courses. Firstly there is no point in them (other than financing the university) since there are very few jobs for their graduates, and most of the jobs that do exist are very low paid if they are paid at all. On a more fundamental note, vocational courses such as these, undermine the true purpose of universities as centres of academic learning and ground breaking research.

Pennies from Heaven

I like to pick up pennies in the street. It's a really good thing to do. Bending down to get the coin is great exercise and it makes me richer.

Sometimes I worry about the possibility of picking up germs along with the pennies, but if you can get diseases this way you can probably get them from any coin no matter where it comes from. A frightening thought!

For the most part the coins are there because kids throw them away. They don't like to clutter up their pockets with small change. It jangles when they walk (which is uncool) and makes their clothing bulge in unfashionable ways.

Just lately there seem to be more coins on the pavements than there used to be. Strange, really, considering we live in recessionary times with high unemployment and a great deal of fear about the future.

The last time I remember an epidemic of coin throwing, a time when the minimum value was regarded as too small a unit to be worth keeping, was in the mid 1960s. On my way to school in the morning I could nearly always find a half penny (or hapenny), sometimes several. At the time there were 480 half pennies to the pound (this was before decimalisation). Now there are 100 pennies to the pound.

Does this mean that inflation has made the currency worth about a fifth of its value in the 1960s?

Possibly, but it seems unlikely. In the 1970s I was interested in buying houses and spent some of my time writing about building inflation. At the time (I remember) the cheapest house in London cost about £10k. Today the same house would fetch about £200k. That would suggest prices have gone up by a factor of twenty, not five.


Perhaps the main difference was the size of the coin. In the 1960s the hapenny was exactly the same size as the modern 2p. As a consequence it made more of a bulge in the pockets than the current penny.

In the mid 1960s the years of austerity (the hungry 30s, the war years, the drab 50s) were coming to an end. Today the economy appears to be balanced on a knife edge with global depression as likely as a new era of technologically fuelled growth and prosperity. But no matter what the future holds I'm grateful for the exercise all those cool teenagers give me by throwing away their small change.

Going the extra mile for ratings

TV crime show host Wallace Souza went a little too far to boost ratings. He orchestrated murders so he could tip off camera crews who were in the area when the event happened.

But the strain of this lifestyle seems to have told on Souza. He died at a hospital in São Paulo, Brazil, after having a heart attack.

Souza is not the only tv worker to bring about his own downfall, but his story is more dramatic than most. It's a tough business and not one for the faint hearted.

Everyone in the video industry should think about his case the next time they are asked by a prospective employer if they are prepared to go the extra mile or if they are totally committed. Souza clearly should have been committed and put in a mental institution, not a tv channel.

The Wave

Just saw Dennis Gansel's 2008 film The Wave. Powerful drama. It suggests that Fascism could easily be re-born in Germany and that liberalism and toleration is just skin deep. I guess that's right, but clearly it could happen in England just as easily.

The film was impressive from start to finish, experimenting with different styles with even a few seconds of spoof Hitchcock style suspense thrown into the mix. Despite the pot porri, it was all quality work. Clearly the German film industry has reached levels of sophistication and professionalism not seen in the UK. Don't get me wrong, great films are made here, but I haven't seen a film that has attempted to explore the range of The Wave.

Gansel clearly believes in the power of film: not 3d spectacular or computorised wizardry, but real actors in real drama on real film. Maybe this is the start of the Campaign for Real Film?

It is certainly a film every teacher should see. If the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, this film should be part of your vigilance kit!

Entropy

Entropy, entropy, how could a hen throw pea? It's quite possible to imagine a zero sum universe where there is no such thing as entropy. But that isn't our universe. In our universe it is a basic law that all energy decays so that even if the universe does not collapse on itself ending up with a Small Squelch, it will still come to an end some day when it runs out of energy. That's entropy.

It's all down to the Second Law of Thermodynamics: as Flanders and Swann explained "Heat will not of itself pass from one body to a hotter body."

Since energy can only degrade, once it reaches the lowest possible state it can only disappear. But what happens to all those little bits of decay. Do they really just disappear? That's hardly logical. If they disappear where do they disappear to?

Douglas Adams in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy models the Big Bang as sand running out of the plug hole of a conical, ebony bath filmed and the film run backwards. It's a crazy image and meant to be a joke. But who knows, maybe that's what the big bang was like: the bottom half of an egg timer.

Suppose the other half of that egg timer contains the decayed energy and entropy is simply the connection between our universe and another, the neck between the two conical ebony baths. So energy seeps out of one universe and into another.

It's a crazy idea and probably totally unprovable. But it is rather beautiful.

One objection might be that the Big Bang happened rather quickly whereas entropy is exceeding slow. But time and energy are variables in Einstein's famous equation. When the whole subject of the discussion is the destruction and creation of matter and energy, what does time mean? In one ebony bath 100 billion years elapses while in the other ebony bath only a hundred billionth of a second goes by!

In fact some have speculated that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is about the creation of time or perhaps the description of the fact that time exists.

The Egg Timer theory is certainly a lot more elegant than the idea of the Higgs Boson, but here's hoping no-one ever builds anything like that Large Hadron Collider to check it out. I think it should remain just a neat idea.

Image of Divine Feminine- in progress by Donna Raymond

Disintermediation

The future of broadcasting, if there is going to be one, is going to be disintermediated, or at least less intermediated than present. The gate keepers who determine channel schedules will gradually lose power. Content providers don't need them if they can talk directly to the audience. Disney and Fox, for example have already gone down this route becoming broadcasters with channels of their own as well as film makers.

Of course it is quite tricky to build an audience and it would be appalling to get rid of one set of gate keepers, the tv executives, only to find there is another, Google and the various alternative online broadcasting networks.

I have a video on Youtube about the Singing Ringing Tree, an artistic and sculptural installation in Burnley. Everyone says it is the best on Youtube. When a web site that spotlights architecture that makes a sound wanted to feature the Singing Ringing Tree they asked for permission to link to my video.

But if you search for my video on Youtube or Google you probably won't find it. This is not because the other videos have paid for a better position in the index-- at least I don't think it is. What is happening is that the searches are picking up the oldest entries before the newer ones. And, of course, the older ones have had more views so if 'hits' are significant in determining listing they also get a leg up from that. My video has had about 10,000 views. Trust me it is a lot better than the most popular video which has had considerably more than 1.5m views.

It seems the brave new world of unfiltered communication, of film makers talking directly to their audience, has one or two problems of its own.