Tag: uk

English cross-country adventure

My parents are visiting me. All the important stuff is done — I’ve shown them around Cambridge and mum has fed me homecooked genuine Chinese food. Tomorrow, we’re starting a nine day car trip all around England. We’re going to:

  • Stonehenge
  • Bath
  • Warwick and Stratford
  • Manchester
  • Lake District
  • York
  • London

You won’t be hearing from me for a while, then.

An early version of the trip. We might not make it to Oxford, though. It doesn’t matter. Oxford is the poor man’s Cambridge. We’re also going to London later, right before we take a cheap and unsustainable flight to Amsterdam, then Paris.

You’ll find me looking like this all over the countryside: furry hat, camera, and an apple in my mouth. This photo was taken by Nitin on his mobile phone camera in Bath.

Finally, I got this link from Tristan. This junction is just north of my department. It’s a sight to look forward to when the undergraduates get back next term. Viva la bike!

A week in Cornwall

I’ve spent most of the week in Cornwall with my classmates, which is why I haven’t replied to my emails or updated my blog. I really enjoyed the field trip and will have some pictures and stories.

We stopped at Bath (my second visit now) and had lunch in front of the Royal Crescent.



Here are two photos I took from my early morning walks along a beach in Newquay, where we stayed.

These are some of the biomes at the Eden Project. They are giant glasshouses, which lead visitors through a tour of human dependence on plants.


Both these photos come from the Humid Tropics Biome. It really did feel like we were in Malaysia or Brazil.

This statue was one of many in the Warm Temperate Biome.

Natural history and gardens

Damjan and I wanted to go see a show in London but it seems like the theatres take a break on Sunday. The only shows on were Stomp and the Blue Man Group, both of which we have seen.

So instead, we visited the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and Kensington Gardens. Today was sunny, windy and cold.

The Natural History Museum is housed in a beautiful massive terracotta Victorian building, purpose-built to house the collection. I took this photo from in front of a cross-sectional cut of a 1300-year-old sequoia tree on the first floor landing.

We learned about how humans fit into the primate family and our evolutionary links.


This is Royal Albert Hall, the famous concert hall opposite Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens.

Damjan is looking at the Albert Memorial, which I thought was just a little too big and a little too gold to take seriously.

The statue of the man on the horse is called ‘Statue of Physical Energy’. The sun was shining on the statue-man’s face and I thought it was very neat, the way he was shading his eyes. I wonder if the alignment was deliberate?

Braindump

A snapshot into the mess that is Joan’s brain.


The final version (after four major revisions).


For one of my assignments, I chose to look at glass recycling in the UK. The UK has an interesting problem — namely, it exports too much whiskey and imports too much wine! Whiskey comes in clear glass bottles, while wine generally comes in green glass. This means that UK glass recyclers have to deal with mounds of unwanted green glass, while UK industry is clamouring for the clear type.

The imbalance is made worse by mixed recycling systems. Councils in the UK have been putting lots of money into kerbside recycling to help UK meet its EU recycling targets (60% of glass packaging to be recycled by 2008). However, to ratchet up the recycling rate, households want the convenience of not having to sort through different coloured glass or having to provide space for bins for each colour. Colour contamination can muck up a batch of clear recycled glass.

What are the solutions? If you look at the relationships that I’ve drawn in the causal loop diagrams, you might find the right points in the system to poke. These are the options I’ve come up with:

  • Separate colour glass collections;
  • Developing other markets for yucky coloured glass (like crushing the glass up for use in roads);
  • Exporting green and mixed glass to other EU nations for reuse in containers;
  • Persuading importers to use clear glass containers or lightweight coloured glass (to reduce the amount of coloured glass being thrown out);
  • Increasing UK consumer acceptance of coloured glass containers; and
  • Increasing the collection of clear and amber glass (e.g. by encouraging recycling of jars).

I’m using this systems dynamics framework in my MPhil dissertation. It’s an interesting way to analyse cause-and-effect, feedback loops, and stocks and flows. At the moment, the title of my dissertation is, “A systems view of government policies to promote environmentally conscious housing design: comparison of The Netherlands, UK and China”. It’s a little unwieldy, I know. Coming up with a sexy dissertation title is not easy.

Postcards from the Cotswolds

The Cotswolds is an AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) in the south of England. It’s full of typically English picturesque villages. How picturesque? See for yourself. I took these photos last weekend, when Damjan, Maja, Kreso and I rented a car to go dancing and exploring.

Burford is a beautiful English village, which has been taken over by tourist-loaded cars.

If you can’t get to London to see the real thing, Burford School comes to the rescue! It’s kind of like Microsoft Office: Student Edition.

Burford has a few strange things. There are green crosses like these on many of the walls…

And giant green ‘salt’ boxes on the sidewalks.

A pot plant.

The people living in this house must not have been into pot plants.

Like the good souls that we are, we immediately walked towards the church.

There are a lot of churches in England. They’re often the most beautiful buildings.

I like taking photos in graveyards here in England. There’s lots of moss.


We trespassed on private property. This, in England, is called ‘rambling’. It’s a national past-time.

Rambling is muddy business. Damjan and Kreso found a large stick to scrape off the clods of mud. Can you tell Damjan likes to dance?

Winter Wonderland

Last night, I went to Clare Hall formal hall. I wore a skirt with tights and rode my bike there. I have a vicious looking mountain bike, not designed for riding while wearing a skirt. The skirt, of course, kept scrunching upwards. It was very cold. My legs, protected only by the sheerest nylon, were cold. Luckily, they were soon numb and I was quite comfortable.

Today, I woke up and the world was covered in snow. Fluffy white spots floated from the sky to rest on every surface: cars, leaves, branches, ledges, bike seats, roads and lawns. To Australian eyes, it looked like a whole lot of snow.

I was meant to take a train to London for a meeting this afternoon. At the breakfast table, I asked my Dino and Alex, “Do trains run when there’s snow?”

“Yes,” they replied, unconcerned. Dino comes from snowy Canada and Alex comes from snowy Norway.

“Actually,” they added, “Maybe not in England. Trains in England stop when there are leaves on the track.”

Toxic green

Some people have asked about the green skies in photos that I posted a few days ago. On my laptop screen, the green is a nice mild-mannered diffuse heavenly tinge. I edited the photos using Picasa2. I kind of liked the green reflection of the oval in the sky. However, when I saw the photos on flatscreens, LCDs and CRTs elsewhere, the skies looked toxic green. Wah! If only I could control all the screens in the world!

Here are the originals with their boring white skies.


Why climate change prevents me from doing my homework

I had been at my computer since early morning working on an essay. The desk was littered with an empty coffee mug, muesli-encrusted bowl, lecture notes and books.

Someone tapped my door.

“Morning, Dino,” I said, swinging my computer chair around.

“Look outside,” Dino whispered.

I drew the curtains back.

“Snow!” I squealed.

“That’s right! It’s snow.”

Half an hour later, I had abandoned my essay and was heading out with scarf, gloves, a feather-down coat and camera.

This is a photo of the Fenner’s Cricket Ground and one of my college’s buildings.

My college often rents this building out for conferences. The poorer colleges often rely on funds from conferences to eke out an existence. Other colleges, on the other hand, own major British docks and science parks.

This might be a sundial. It wasn’t working today for some reason.

Ah, Joan. Using that tired old ‘framing with stuff onsite’ composition. This is the stuff of cheesy postcards 🙂

This is the back of the main building at my college. The front is prettier but there are unattractive cars and fences that I can’t Photoshop out.

Some of my college mates live here. This was the first time I stepped into the courtyard. It’s quite a pretty space.

Some smart cookie knew it was going to snow. Either that or their bike seat is too tattered to sit on without wrapping it up with a plastic bag from Sainsbury’s.

Reality Foto

I used to be happy when I took a photo that looked like what I saw in real life. There is skill in knowing how to use a camera so that the lighting, perspectives and colours are ‘right’. I’m getting better at doing this but I still need to take two, three, four or more photos of the one scene before I am satisfied.

Increasingly, I am interested in creating photos that reflect not the reality I see but an image I have in my mind. It seems to me that photography stops being a memory capture process and becomes ‘art’ when you start heavily post-processing.

I kept about 120 photos from my Yorkshire holiday. Of those 120, there are surprisingly few that I am happy with. Yorkshire at this time of year can be a dreary, grey sort of place. Late last night, I experimented a little on the computer. This is what I came up with.



I just couldn’t take a photo of this scene (Whitby Abbey) with a wide enough contrast. Either the ruins and gravestones were too dark or the sky was bleached out. Using the computer, I was able to boost the fill light and contrast, as well as crop out the empty space. One day, I will get a wider angle lens so that I can make real panoramas.



It was a beautiful sight as we rounded the corner, jumped a gate and realised how wide the River Tees was. My photos of the scene were dull and ordinary, probably because it was a dull and ordinary day. Once again, I didn’t have a wide enough lens to convey the vastness.

On the computer, there was nothing I could do to make this a panorama shot but at least the colour filter allowed me to create an interesting picture. It looks a little like an old-fashioned painting. If I could recompose the photo with my camera, I would have included a bit more grass at the bottom. Unfortunately, this composition suffers a little from the feeling that the observer is about to topple off the cliff.



This photo modification made me the happiest of Joans! The doctored photo was what I had in mind when I took the original (near Steel Rigg, Hadrian’s Wall). Imagine my disappointment at how washed out the colours were! In fact, the original is a pretty good reflection of reality. Reality, in this case, was just not good enough.


Finally, just to prove that I am not completely dependent on post-processing, this photo of York Minster Chapter House is all camera work. Of course, I had to take about eight photos to get this one.

There’s never any Joan

I thought of all places in the world, there would be the greatest chance for name products in England to include ‘Joan’ in their range. Joan is a good English name. It used to be popular in the 1920s and 1930s.

I looked amongst the pea pots in a tourist shop at the seaside town of Whitby. As always, there was no Joan.