Monthly Archives: May 2007

Feminism

Abortion: defend it now in the UK

May 26, 2007 – 1:02 pm

A message that I just sent to my MP:

I understand that on June 5, Ann Winterton will table a Ten Minute Rule Bill to impose mandatory counselling on women seeking an abortion.
This is a condescending, cynical attempt to chip away at women’s abortion rights that will lead to further delays in service provision: and some women already have to wait up to five week! for an NHS
abortion.
This is the third anti-choice Bill in less than a year, and reflects a contempt for parliamentary procedures in a refusal to accept the democratic decision.
Please make the effort to actively oppose this bill, by voting against it.

If you are in the UK, please do likewise.

(As a result of an alert from Abortion Rights.)

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Women's history

Who would you like to have been?

May 26, 2007 – 11:08 am

For a bit of fun – life seems a big of a slog at the moment – I’ve added to my sidebar a little poll about which famous woman you’d like to have been in a previous life: you could if you wish draw all sorts of psychological conclusions from which you choose – I couldn’t possibly comment.

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Early modern history

Please raise your glasses

May 26, 2007 – 10:21 am

… to the inventor of them:

Before George Ravenscroft’s invention of lead glass in London in about 1677, most quality drinking glasses used in Britain were fragile luxuries imported from Venice, or made in England in the Venetian style in glasshouses often run by glassmakers from the continent. Ravenscroft’s formula using lead oxide instead of soda produced a new type of glass which was brilliantly clear and strong, and much more like rock crystal than ‘cristallo’, the Venetian soda glass.

The physical attributes of lead glass together with changes in fashion meant that glassmakers began to produce a more simple style of drinking glass, with straight-sided funnel shaped bowls, robust stems with plain baluster shapes, and large feet for stability.

(Hat-tip to Sundries.)

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Environmental politics Science

Saturday reading

May 26, 2007 – 9:56 am

* A magical fossil: it makes sense that many land-dwelling dinosaurs would have been able to swim, but how could you conceivably prove it?

Well what you do is find is a “15-metre-long track (49 feet) in sandstone “strongly suggests a floating animal clawing the sediment” as it swam against a current”. Something magical, I think, about the survival of this 125 million-year-old record.

* Matthew Parris, somewhat unexpectedly, on what is wrong with democracy. But as ever, he makes interesting reading…

* Delhi is planning to get rid of the cows, so the cars can go faster. Reference my link yesterday about traffic-calming measures, perhaps we could import them to London? (But very sad for Delhi, if they succeed, which os course they might not, although they did apparently succeed in geting rid of the elephants, unlike Bangkok.)

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Environmental politics

Redesigning streets for people, an opportunity

May 25, 2007 – 9:06 pm

A new scheme to help local residents redesign their streets for them, not for cars: DIY streets. I hear on the grapevine they are looking for pilot projects…

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Politics

An aboriginal reconquest?

May 25, 2007 – 8:04 pm

This article in the Sydney Morning Herald presents a seductive idea, that the Aborigines are reconquerng Australia, starting from the dry centre, where the “whites” are leaving due to the lack of economic opportunities.

It isn’t as simplistic as that; it does acknowledge that the Aboriginal communities do have enormous problems, flowing in part from that lack of opportunity, but what it also doesn’t address is the way the environment has been enormously degraded – mined you might almost say. The water has been used up, the vegetation over-grazed to the point of extinction, the soil eroded.

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