Gwyneth's personal blog

Weather same as it was 10 minutes ago, except the quilt has lost definition and I can't see any swifts.

Did I mention we have a second invasion, this time those handsome Swedish tiger moths, first outlier spotted in our kitchen a couple of years ago at this time. This year, I see them darting and fluttering at treetop level, all across the Crescent gardens.


The Marine and Coastal Access Bill has a consultation document up online, it's a little difficult to find but this should get you to the pdf: http://www.defra.gov.uk/corporate/consult/marine-conservation-zones/MPA-draft-strategy-consultation.pdf
Please respond, before July 13th, if you're interested in conservation, fish (including eating them), diving, seabirds, or anything of that kind. As you must have heard, recently, it's scary what's happening to global fish stocks, and shocking that there is a solution (No Take Zones) that's proven, swiftly successful and speedily profitable, but NTZs aren't being included in the Bill as it stands, for fear of reprisals from the fishing industry. The same "fishing industry" that soon won't exist unless dramatic action is taken, but no, they'd rather chew their own paws off and bleed to death than let anyone help them out of the trap.

What is a No Take Zone? What it sounds like. It's an area, usually quite small, inshore or in the open sea, from which nobody's allowed to take any fish, shellfish, crustaceans. No commercial fishing, with any kind of gear; no angling. Leisure diving, boating, swimming regulated but allowed. Ideally, they're areas identified as spawning or nursery grounds for important commercial or conservation-worthy species. In the open ocean (cf the Plaice Box) they work but not terrifically well, because the fishing crews just put more pressure on the adjoining areas. Inshore, which is the area the Bill covers, they've been found to work swiftly and spectacularly, restoring populations of young fish, lobsters, scallops, cockles, whatever, and when they grow up & wander out of the zone they put the local fishing industry back in business in a sustainable way. It's simply game-keeping for the wild harvest of the ocean, and about bloody time. (excuse my Australian, the pioneers of this kind of conservation are Australian and NZ). See this site

Monday 22nd June, warm. A bright, downy layered overcast, the kind of sky that promises rain or sun, but fails to deliver either.

Last Wednesday, on a chill June evening, we took the train to Shoreham for an event in the Adur Festival Art of Science programme, a multi-media science lecture presented by Philip Harris from Sussex Uni, devised by Harris, Richard Durrant, and Malcolm Buchanan-Dick. Truly awesome and far-reaching it says here, and no word of a lie. A short history of the alphabet soup (or "particle zoo") that presently pertains, quarks and all, with abstract music and visuals generated from the EDM experiment at Grenoble. Thoroughly good and gripping exposition of what "we" currently think is going on,and why. Supposing it isn't turtles all the way down, that is. We always have to take this kind of thing on faith of course, how could it be otherwise, but it was excellent fun, how refreshing to see a full house for the most abstruse of natural philosophy, and a welcome alternative to Richard Dawkins feeble "The God Delusion"

read recently, in response to a challenge on this blog from Marc Jacobs, "what have you got against Dawkins??"

. . . Dawkin's whole argument seeming to be "Don't worship that silly opinionated old bloke on a cloud over there, worship THIS silly, opinionated middle-aged bloke over here! To be fair, someone pointed out it's really a fractious response to the drubbing he got from Bible Belt creationists, but even so! He ought to be ashamed.

I wanted to ask exactly how the "measurements of asymmetries within a neutron" related to the whale-song style sound and Acid Test light show, but there were too many other people with much better prepared questions, & I wouldn't have understood much of the answer, so I just paid attention instead.