England in July

This year clouds feature strongly in my July pictures. This one taken as we walked near Whipsnade on Saturday - quite a delightful and varied walk with lots to see.

The spirit of Richard Sandbrook

...lives on. I was delighted to see so many projects underway in memory of Richard, due to his friends and family who have set up the Richard Sandbrook Trust one year on from the commemorative event last year that I remember well.

Al Gore...campaigning and systems

Interesting to see the line-up of the Observer's 2007 ethical awards and that readers awarded Al Gore 'campaigner of the year'. I was also very interested to read in the Observer magazine a recent article from James Traub that started
"Gore was telling me about Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian chemist who won a Nobel Prize in 1977 for his insights into the thermodynamics of open systems, an intriguing subject that has very little to do with global warming. ... We had moved on to complexity theory, in which Gore would really immerse himself if only he had the time, and then to the concept of nested systems, which of course had been developed by the late psychologist Uri Bronfenbrenner...."
I think systems ideas have a lot to offer our current 'climate change and adaptation' agenda so found it interesting to hear where Gore's focus sits in this respect.
I haven't yet fully engaged with what he's been saying recently about energy efficient IT systems, embedded systems and total system design and architecture....but will.

Boring

Lamenting about my organisation's restructuring and renaming process with a colleague, we both used the word boring. It reminded me that at home this weekend someone on the radio was using a different concept of boredom than we were used to....and we found it interesting enough to discuss with our Dutch and Australian visitors (which shows what lengths the wet weekend drove us to). I'd always thought of boring as lack of stimulus but on the radio it was being discussed as a concept where there was lots going on but most of it dissatisfying or frustrating...with an element of 'white noise' about it. Perhaps these two situations just have the same consequence. But we wondered if it was more of a reflection on today's society and particularly on overdosing on multi-media. TV, radio, the internet, music, SMS, phone can all be going strong...and instead of providing stimulation, the result - boredom?

For me the antidote to both sorts of boredom is a walk outdoors across the fields. We tried it with our visitors....set off in bright sunshine with dramatic black clouds hovering not far away in two directions. Wonderful flowers, trees, smells, birdsong and crops around us as we scurried along. Then, sure enough, we got very wet. For me, definitely not boring and a lot more stimulating than sitting around all day indoors. Not sure what the others thought though - we'd already identified the previous day that our appreciation of being outdoors can be of very different aspects.

Weird weather

My recent trip to Greece has focused me this week on two different perspectives on the weather. Once again records are being broken. In UK, in Sheffield for instance, flooding as never seen before from yesterday's sustained and heavy rain. But across Southern Europe e.g. in Volos, near where we were recently the BBC's recording a heat wave - 47 degrees max with 48 degrees tomorrow!! It's cool here now and very difficult to imagine. But what an incredible contrast. Is this instability down to global warming?

The wonders of Greece

It's been my very good fortune to visit the Pelion peninsula in Greece...and Skiathos and Skopelos this past month. Wonderful!

Chapelcross

The cooling towers at Chapelcross were demolished on Sunday 20th May as part of decommissioning of this nuclear power station. Amazing to see that sudden change in a place and a landscape that was very much a part of my early childhood.