Revenge of Gaia, by James Lovelock February 8, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Environment, Reviews , add a commentI bought it. I read it. I am very worried indeed.
I expected to be told things I already knew, and to have my world view reinforced. I did not expect to be told that many of the ideas I, as a Green and a fairly scientifically literate layperson, have taken for granted for years, are wrong. I’m quite pro-technology, and believe that, done properly, science is one of humanities’ greatest achievements, but I’ve also been sure that some of science’s recent excesses are not good, and are in fact downright dangerous.
Nuclear power is a bad thing. It is unsafe, and leaves an unmanageable legacy for future generations. But our fossil fuel based civilisation is leaving an unmanageable legacy for future generations and more people would die if a hydrodam burst in a populated place, than died from Chernobyl.
Organic farming is a good thing. It stops chemicals which the environment can’t handle building up in signficant quantities and preserves the land and ecosystems. I never knew what slurry was, and had always assumed that eutrophication came from NPK fertilisers.
This book has given me a lot to think about, and a lot of ideas to test. And a lot to worry about. If even the Greens are wrong about how we should deal with the state of the planet, then I struggle to see much hope at all.
Grown up person, with pension February 7, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Investing , add a commentI’ve done it. I’ve filled in the form, written the cheque and sent it off. I am now the proud possessor of an online Self Invested Personal Pension. This means that I put money in, the nice Inland Revenue top it up, and then I have to work out what to invest it in. At least this way, it doesn’t disappear down the black hole of some dodgy misselling scheme, or suddenly find itself ‘unsustainable’. It could easily find itself very unprofitable if I don’t do the investing properly, but I’ll have noone to blame but my own silly self if I end up on a doorstep somewhere at age 85.
Now I have to start thinking about what to actually invest in, and I may well blog about that over the coming weeks as its sure to become something of an obsession. At the moment, I’m thinking of splitting the first years payments into three roughly equal parts:
1. Fidelity’s Special Situations Fund. This has been a consistent top performer for about the last twentyfive years. It is about to be split, and have a change of fund manager, which could cause it to lose value, but Fidelity seem to be managing this situation well. It looks like a good, medium risk bet.
2. A UK FTSE 100 tracker. Not quite sure which one, probably one with low fees which matches the market as closely as possible. The fees are very low on these because there’s no real work invovled in managing them. There seems to me to be something intrinsically profitable about the FTSE 100 - the worst performing stocks fall out of the index, and the best performing of the rest move in.
3. Split between 2-3 very small caps. At the moment, I’m thinking of two AIM-listed shares. The first is Renewable Energy Holdings, which has interests in wind and wave energy. It listed about a year ago, and has just had a windfarm in Germany come online, so it actually has some cashflow. Equally importantly, its CETO wave-power device has passed a trial stage and is coming closer to market. I believe wave power will be a much bigger thing in the future than wind, and am keen to invest in this sector. The second is Plusnet, which is a network provider at the lower end of the market, reselling mostly BT infrastructure. Their fundamentals look good, they’ve got stacks of cash and increasing numbers of customers. Because they have no wires of their own, they’re free to move into new technologies (such as wireless) very quickly. I believe that the telecoms market is still going through a huge shakedown and its hard to see who the winners might be. Companies with a lot of technical nous, which are not hampered by having to make a return on mis-invested capital, seem a good bet.
More research needed at this stage, but its got me thinking.
That’s TURBAN guys
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Miscellany , add a commentTo all the people who are using search engines and finding this blog based on variants of ‘Muhammed Cartoon Turbine’ - it’s a turban. Turbine = round thing for making electricity. Turban = round thing that goes on your head. Very different.
So far, about 20 people have been looking for highly offensive cartoons of the Prophet with a bomb in his power station. You’re out of luck here.
Trattoria Lucca, Parkway, Camden Town
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Cafes & Restaurants, Camden , add a commentI had another one of my little urges for steak, red wine and green vegetables this evening, so took myself off for dinner at the Trattoria Lucca on Parkway in Camden. I first went there about four years ago, when our elderly neighbours told us about it. They’ve been going since the late sixties, so the place has a long and venerable history.
It’s one of those wonderfully comfortable local restaurants, with a clientele of people who live in the area, many of whom have clearly been visiting for a while. The family who own it are Londoners from Lucca in Tuscany, including two brothers and their elderly parents and the service is very friendly and homely. It’s like popping round to a favourite aunt’s for dinner, except you don’t have to do the washing up (though you do have to pay the bill.
The food is Tuscan for a British palate, with desserts, including profiteroles, on a trolley. There’s a good selection of half sized bottles for the single diners, and the Filetto al Pepe is excellent. In the summer, they serve an good spicy gazpacho, though the specials don’t change much. Nothing changes much, that’s what’s so good about the place.
A Colonial Ritual
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : New Zealand , add a commentFebruary 6th is New Zealand’s national day, Waitangi Day. It commemorates the signing of the treaty of Waitangi between the British Crown and the combined tribes of Aotearoa / New Zealand, and the founding of our country. The treaty has been more honoured in the breach, though there have been serious attempts to rectify that wrong in the last 20 years or so, and the day remains one of controversy.
For Kiwi’s in London though, there is time-honoured ritual to unite those who are so very far from home. I’d completely forgotten about this until, waiting for a friend at High St Kensington station on Saturday afternoon, I saw, and heard, thousands of Kiwis leaving and coming into the station. The circle line was clogged full of them, as the great annual Circle Line Pub Crawl was underway. This tradition is a simple one, where you go around the circle line, and drink a pint at every station. Mostly harmless, though I’m not sure how many people manage the whole 25 stations. Maybe it’s just as well half of it was closed for engineering works.
All together now “We’re all drunk on the yellow circle line, the yellow circle line, the yellow circle line…”
A Month of Blogging February 6, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , add a commentIt’s just on a month since I started Camden Lady, and it’s definitely gone well. I’m getting 30-60 hits a day, and the most I’ve had in any single day is 67, which is rather more than I’d expected to get this quickly. Most of the traffic seems to come from Best Blog, Carnival of the Green and search engines. My Technorati ranking has gone from about 1.2M to 494390, which is a massive, if fairly easy, improvement. Most blogs are never updated after the first week, so I’m not doing too badly.
The most popular posts surprise me. Despite a lot of searchs for the cartoons causing all the riots, and two posts on that, the most popular posts are :
Women and Men use the internet in much the same way. Ho hum…
Trees, January 2006 (February is coming soon) and
James Lovelock Starting the Week.
I’m fascinated that older posts still seem to get read, as people find them through the search engines. Book reviews seem to be the most popular search, either through tags or google searchs for specific books.
The Wordpress tool is very simple to use, which means its easy to concentrate on creating content, though I suspect I may get frustrated with not being able to add in anything that needs the ability to edit html or run javascript.
Blogging is forcing me to think more about what I do, and I find myself thinking about whether something would make a good blog entry as I go through the day. I’m settling into a few themes, though I think I’ll keep on writing about whatever takes my fancy. That’s what its all about! Read and enjoy.
Carnival of the Green, #13
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Environment , add a commentFor a roundup of postings on matters environmental over the last week, including mine about decentralising electricity supply, please head over to Carnival of the Green on Ecostreet. Lots of interesting stuff on everything from permaculture to the evils of SUVs.
Why Are People So Enraged by the Cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed? February 5, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Politics , add a commentI see the Danish Embassies burning in Beirut and Damascus, and the protests here in London and I struggle to understand. The view of the world this shows is completely alien to my own. I cannot imagine threatening to kill people, or bomb places, for any insult. I do not think there is a way my mind could take me there. Freedom to verbally challenge and even ridicule fundamental ideas and beliefs is a vital foundation of our culture - violently challenging it is not something that western societies can accept and remain themselves.
But it is vital to understand this alien mind, not necessarily to agree with it, or even condone, but to understand so that a way out can be found.
Some years ago, I had the good fortune to get to know someone who was extremely intelligent, well-educated but completely non-western. He was a Tibetan Lama, a former abbot of one of the great colleges of the school of Tibetan Buddhism which is headed by the Dalai Lama. His worldview was very different to mine. For instance, he believed that misfortune now was the direct result of ‘negativities’, or bad actions, in the past, possibly even in a past life. A direct consequence of this is that a child born crippled is not innocent as Christian based society would believe but is in fact someone working through some negativity from a past life. In a sense, they are almost to be envied, because we all have negativities, the consequences of which we will have to bear. To a person raised in a European society, this is a very alien idea and perhaps even rather offensive, at least until you think it through carefully. Understanding the idea and worldview behind it, particularly the belief in karma, is essential.
So, what is going on here as we watch civilisations clash in protest around Danish embassies. Certainly, there is a world view which holds very different values and which places an insult to the Prophet Muhammed as far more important than freedom of speech. This is also a world view where direct action, rather than polite protest, is acceptable. The offense given by Jerry Springer - the Opera was extreme but did not cause even the most angry Christians to burn down the theatre. Have these cartoons done something which causes real harm to those who are protesting, or their families and those they hold dear? It would seem so. To cause protesters in the UK to do this much damage, unless they were just rent-a-mob spoiling for a fight, there would need to be some strong action to which they were reacting - perhaps someone in their community had been harmed, or something stolen?
It seems then that the damage done by these cartoons is similar to someone from a rival community physically attacking someone. It is far more than the damage we in the west see, far more than that caused by burning our flags or insulting our icons.
What can or should we do with that idea? In some ways, nothing. It is an important value in our society that we be free to ridicule cultural and religious icons, and we should not forget that. It is our own view of the world, and we should not lose sight of it for trying to understand someone elses. However, tolerance and living side by side with people of different cultures is also a very strong and important value, and publishing this sort of thing, knowing the hurt and damage it causes our neighbours, is not the act of a kind and tolerant society.
So we should restrain ourselves, and not insult those with different ways of seeing the world.
And to the people threatening bombs in London - here, in this place, there are far more effective ways of protesting. You do not have to threaten to make your point. In fact, threatening will turn many people who support you against you. Unless you’re just trying to make trouble, calm down.
First Steps in Shares, by Peter Temple February 4, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Investing, Reviews , add a comment
As 40 looms ever nearer, the need to sort out pensions and savings becomes ever more pressing. I’ve decided to go for a Self Invested Personal Pension, which means that you put money in, the nice Inland Revenue give you some more, and you invest it as best you can to avoid penury in old age. I’m not too good at trusting people with my money, and too many pension products in the UK are far to complicated or unreliable, so I’m going to try to do it myself. I’m also very keen to invest as ethically as I can, and somehow the so-called ethical funds, which are strong on Tescos and BP, aren’t quite what I have in mind.
I expect that I’ll put some of the money into managed funds, but I intend to buy stocks and shares directly as well. so I bought this little book to get me started. It’s surprising, looking in bookshops at the shelves dedicated to the stock market, just how much hype and snake oil there is, and how many big fat books there are which really only have one or two ideas in them. Its as bad as IT or management studies.
I wanted to find a book which offered sensible, down to earth advice, without getting ridiculously technical, which was current and aimed at the British reader. This seems to fill the bill. It explains the basics - different instruments, how to deal, basic reading of company accounts and what to look for, analysis and timing, how to value shares - in a comprehensive, clear and concise way. I already knew a lot of this stuff, but there was a lot I didn’t know, and this explained that well. It also has an interesting section at the end where the author talks about how he has managed his own portfolio over the years, the mistakes he’s made (very rare in these kinds of books!) and the successes.
Recommendation: buy! (And if you click the picture above, and buy it from amazon.co.uk, you’ll give me a little more money to invest)
Attack the ‘toons February 2, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Miscellany , add a commentOn opposite sides of the clash of civilisations, cartoons seem to be causing offence today. The US Joint Chiefs of Staff have taken umbrage at a cartoon in the Washington Post, while throughout Europe and the Middle East, Muslims are in an uproar over cartoons in a number of European papers depicting, amoungst other things, the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban.
It may be coincedence, but as I write, and google for a copy of the cartoons to see what the fuss is about, I see that both France Soir and Jyllands Posten (the Danish paper which published the cartoons originally) are off the air. I found them on an obscure site and my first reaction is that its hard to see what the problem is. However, I couldn’t see why the Washington Post caused such extreme offence to the US Generals either.
When it comes to the sacred, the things we hold very close perhaps barely understanding why, many of us are easily offended. Some years ago, there was a huge controversy over the painting of a black Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung, and although it didn’t stir up the level of unrest that this has done, Muslims are not alone in taking offence.
I think all these newspapers, in the US and here in Europe, are right to publish as they have. The cartoons have points to make and in a free, secular society, they should be permitted to make them. Of course, those who are offended have the right to protest, to withdraw their support for manufacturers and do whatever they wish, within the law, to make their point as well. But this is a very difficult, very sensitive time and it would also do us all good to not deliberately provoke our neighbours and on the other hand, if offense is offered, to reject it as the poisoned chalice that it is and move on.
