Public service announcement

"Everyone has a role to play in helping to make London a hostile place for terrorists..." Your risk of being killed in a terror attack may be minimal. But please, if you see any suspicious looking people trying to blend in to your community, contact the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorism Hotline.

Rowing was the winner on the day

Today was the 150th Oxford & Cambridge boat race, an event that has been running since 1829 (with occasional stoppages for world wars). One of Duncan's workmates Nicole lives 100m from the start of the race, near Putney Bridge. The race proceeds from there upstream for four and a quarter miles, finishing in the general region of Bronwyn's school...

Weather for the boat race has varied over the years ― past temperatures ranging from -4.1 degrees to 23.6 degrees. Perhaps hoping for the latter, Nicole and James decided to host a BBQ (they're Aussies, after all). As it turned out it was 9 degrees today, pretty moderate compared with the past... Still, the barbie must go on! The 20 or so guests were nearly all Australian, but Bronwyn survived. It's a funny thing, actually. Coming away from New Zealand is helping me to slowly re-discover my Australian roots. Anyway, sometime after the barbie having watched the start of the race at the river we headed back to the house where we saw the rest on telly... slightly surreal.

I cheered for “Australia” initially, but figured better take sides and decided on Cambridge in honour of old mate Tony who is studying there. Not a bad choice ― after an early and controversial clash of oars (Oxford at fault) Cambridge pulled steadily away and finished a full six lengths ahead... A little larger than Oxford's win last year by one foot...

Kind of strange to watch the presumably well-heeled students of two rich universities (not the best rowers in the country) fighting it out in one of the most celebrated sports events of the year here. Still, that's tradition, I suppose. Long on hoopla, perhaps sometimes short on rationale. Not that they don't train hard either ― two hours of training for every stroke of the race, apparently. 250,000 other people thought it was worth turning out for, 7.7 million in the UK watched it on TV last time too apparently, and millions more around the world. For us, well, we were there, we met some nice people at Nicole and James', and it didn't rain on the barbie.

For whom the bell tolls

Though all is quiet on the western front, statements following the Madrid bombing that a terrorist attack on London is inevitable continue to ring in my ears... Even though we've always known London was at risk, this new announcement seems to have changed things at least in my head. I admit that I have wondered whether we should consider leaving London ― while there are lots of good things about being here, there are other places we could live and work. But for now at least, we'll stay put. And here's why...

Imagine if you will that rather than just believing a terrorist attack on London was “inevitable", we could know with certainty one would occur in the next twelve months. How much risk would we be at? Let us suppose the attack was of the magnitude of both the Madrid and Bali bombings, with around 200 people being killed (and of course, scores more injured). Without question a despicable and evil act.

At the time of the 2001 census, the population of the inner and outer boroughs of London was 7,172,000. If we presume that all residents have an equal probability of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Bronwyn and I would each have a 1 in 35,860 chance of being killed in the terrorist attack this coming year (presuming one were to happen). I have to admit, this doesn't sound too good. If the odds were this low on Lotto, I'd be buying tickets.

However, in London we don't own a car. I walk to work most days, and catch buses. Bronwyn uses a combination of the buses and a short distance on the District Line tube. Barring terrorist attacks, these are safe forms of transport. In New Zealand we owned a car. (Do you see where this is going?) As I write this the population of New Zealand is estimated at 4,054,555. (It has gone up by four people while I typed the above paragraphs.) The NZ road toll (that is, the number of people who have died on New Zealand roads) in the last twelve months till today is 476. That means that, again assuming equal risk for all, Bronwyn and I would have each had a 1 in 8,518 chance of being killed in a car accident this year, had we stayed in New Zealand. That is 4.2 times more likely than being killed in the terrorist attack.

We could refine these analyses further... We have not included the over five million people who live in the suburban area surrounding London in our analysis, and the London population we have used will have increased since 2001. Furthermore, in New Zealand, Bronwyn and I covered more kilometres and did more than the average amount of open-road long-distance driving, where presumably we were at greater risk. Now, it is possible a terrorist attack might be much larger than Madrid ― perhaps more a New York-magnitude 5,000 deaths. However, such an attack would almost certainly have to target large highrise buildings in the central city, and we don't live or work in that area. Finally, let us permit ourselves to recall that the road toll is almost inevitable, whereas we are merely assuming here there will be a terrorist attack on London ― and let us pray there will not be.

So, have we packed our bags? No. Do we hope to live long in the land the Lord has promised us? Of course. Can we predict the future? Again, no. But we do not live in fear, either for this life or the one that is to come.

A London birthday... or, Anniversal Truth

A year ago today we arrived in London. We've had a good year, with some tough times. Bronwyn observed that it has been a year that has been good for our relationship, and I would agree. The year has passed quickly. Most things haven't changed ― we're still waiting for the introduction of the hovercar, for world peace, and also for less likely things such as reasonably-priced Merton council tax. We'd talked initially of two to two-and-a-half years in the UK, so now have to start considering a half-way point. That's an interesting mental shift for us. Again, Bronwyn has an interesting observation: for the things about London, it feels like we've only just arrived, but thinking about New Zealand, it feels like we've been gone for ages. That captures it exactly. It's not a zero-sum game.

It is a well know “fact” that New Zealand is 12 hours ahead of the United Kingdom. However, this truth is more anniversal, than universal, only coming around for a short period, actually twice a year, when the daylight savings times of New Zealand and the UK coincide. In an average year the two countries are 12 hours apart for only 35 days. For seven days from today we enter one of these rare periods, with New Zealand having come off Daylight Savings early this morning.

Despite its reputation for laclustre summers, the UK spends seven months a year on “British Summer Time” ― from the last Sunday in March till the last in October. We start that period next weekend, moving us back to an 11 hour time difference with NZ again, where we'll sit for just over six months till New Zealand DST starts again on the first Sunday in October. Bronwyn and I are quite pleased with this, as the 11 hour time difference seems the most convenient one for making calls between here and New Zealand. Interestingly, Australia changes to and from summer time in coordination with the UK (and, since 1997, all of Europe). This means that the UK is never a 10 hours difference from Australia, jumping from 11 hours currently to 9 hours next weekend. So why tell you all this? Lets just say that last time we had a time difference change, we found it necessary to switch our phone off overnight for a few weeks. Friendly reminder to those calling, we'd love to hear from you, and suggest though our summer you ring during the following times:

New Zealand: From your 6pm till 8:30am. Weekends ring after 8pm your time. [But for this week: 7pm to 9:30am.]

Australia: From your 4pm till 6:30am, weekends ring after 6pm your time. [But for this week: 6pm to 8:30am.]

This will get us in the UK: Between 7am and 9:30pm, or after 9am on weekends.

Aside from this, do ring! It's cheaper than you think, and we love hearing from you...

To go extinct on Principia?

Last week I finished reading Bill Bryson's most excellent A Short History of Nearly Everything. I heartily recommend this book to everyone, providing you are free from anxiety disorders of the type sensitive to information about the number of bacteria that inhabit your home (or, indeed, yourself), or the likelihood of various cataclysmic disasters. Bronwyn was good enough to gift this collectively to the other three members of our household for Christmas. Well, in the final chapter of this book, Bill writes of Isaac Newton's remarkable Principia (in which his famous three laws of motion appeared), and of the extinction of the Dodo:

That was the 1680s, but these words were ringing in my ears last week when I heard two pieces of news that again juxtaposed, uncomfortably, the mysteries of the universe with the depths of human depravity. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field images from the Hubble Space Telescope were released last week, where we can look at light that has taken billions of years to reach us. These images show us what the universe looked like just 400 million years after its original creation, when still in its infancy. These images are older than anything humans have ever seen before, and they were taken with the telescope pointing at a patch of sky that looks basically empty from Earth. Awesome and inspiring.

At that same time, news came through of the horrific bombings in Madrid. I cannot really comprehend this disgusting act, which I was going to call “mindless” but which was of course all too mindful. Madrid feels much closer to home than New York, even though we'd been up the Twin Towers only seven weeks before the events there. And now, the London Metropolitan Police Commissioner has publicly said that a terrorist attack on London is “inevitable”. Well. (Psalm 91.)

Bill Bryson reports Homo sapiens is to date one of the shortest surviving species on this blue planet, yet we are causing innumerable other species to become extinct. And then we see what we do to each other. So the question that disturbs me, while looking at the wonder of creation revealed through the ingenuity of the Hubble Telescope, is whether the heights achieved by humanity even begin to compensate for the depths we have plumbed.

In fact of course I believe we can't. That is the belief that lies at the heart of a Christian understanding of humanity and our broken relationship with God. We are all depraved ― terrorists and teachers, paedophiles and psychologists alike. All have fallen short, and no striving, no excellence on our own part can close that gap with God. Yet he wanted us home when we could never afford the fare. There is a mystery to how Jesus accomplished what he did for us spiritually, through his death on the cross. Yet there is the Christian message — we could not reach back to him, yet he reached out to us.

flogging blog posts for publication and distribution

The following comments are selections of a series of emails that Dave and I exchanged following his post on this topic and my subsequent follow-up above. For what it's worth we decided to add much of this exchange to the public conversation, and agreed together to publish them both here and on his blog...

Publish or perish

As someone who has published a couple of academic articles, and is writing more, I'm all for proactive, author-controlled, management of the rights to a work. As you surf through the blogosphere* you'll find a lot of sites that are displaying Creative Commons licenses. Yet you won't find one here, or at least not so far. I'm yet to make up my mind about how I feel about having a Creative Commons license for my writing here. And my suspicion is that while some bloggers may have thought these issues through to their conclusion, others have signed up without realising the implications of the act.

The Creative Commons project states that it is “devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share.” The purpose of a Creative Commons license is to indicate the ways in which you are happy for others to use your material. I think the project is excellent and I wholeheartedly support the thoughtful application of their licenses by an author. Did you understand, though, that in most countries an individual's work is already copyrighted from the moment it is stored in some crystallised form? In fact, that's what Creative Commons is trying to address. The purpose is not to establish any rights for the author (you already have them under law) but rather to selectively sign them away.

What prompted me to say all this then? Dave draws attention to the recent experience of Steve over at e~mergent kiwi. Steve was writing an article for Reality Magazine on Mel Gibson's new movie “The Passion of Christ", and posted a draft to his weblog for feedback. He's now upset because some people copied the draft article and emailed it to other people. I understand him being upset, because his expectation was that people would ask him before redistributing his material, especially in this case as he had indicated it was an early draft.

The problem is, Steve has declared on his site that the material there is covered by a Creative Commons license, which reserves some rights, but grants others. This license requires him to be identified as the author of this work, and has a number of other stipulations, but reviewing it (and the full legalese) it is clear that you are not either requested or required to ask his permission before using the work. In fact, the reverse is true. Employing a Creative Commons license is a proactive way for an author to grant permissions so others do not have to ask before copying it. (See the Creative Commons Professor Isaac story for an example.) The license Steve selected clearly states that anyone is free “to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work” and “to make derivative works."

Someone forwarded Steve's draft to Reality magazine apparently, who were unhappy it was being pre-published elsewhere. (An unsurprising response from print media, perhaps?) They contacted Steve, who seems to have been left feeling more than a bit burned. The fact is though, Steve published it under a license that gave people permission to copy the article however they liked, providing they linked back to the source, and included a link to the license. (I'll bet none did the latter, and only some did the former, but that's a slightly different story.) Here I therefore have to disagree with Dave. Copying this work without asking Steve's specific permission was not in any way unethical, because Steve had granted advance permission to everyone to copy and use his work. Furthermore, the license is not revocable, so even now that he has expressed disappointment that the work has been distributed, that does not in fact change the rights he has given for it to be distributed. (Admittedly I personally wouldn't continue to distribute an author's work under those circumstances, usually.)

The big pity here is that Steve has been burned, and the outcome is not what he as the author intended. Steve definitely needs to review his Creative Commons license, because it appears to not describe his true intentions as the author of the blog. It isn't possible to change the license applied to previous entries, but he could consider a different approach for future material.

Ironically, I've been reflecting on these issues for some time because I have in some senses the opposite problem to Steve. When I write an academic article, I'd like it to be available to as wide an audience as possible. However, for a paper to gain credibility it has to be published in a recognised professional journal. Authors receive no payment for publication in scholarly journals, but are required to sign over copyright that grants the publisher almost exclusive publication rights to the paper. The author is given limited permission to personally distribute copies of the paper. What I want to do however is to have pdfs of my papers available on my own web site should anyone wish to access them. I have not done this yet, partly because I am not too sure that this is allowed. Yet as the author of the work, surely this should be my moral right? And with the increasing development of web-based publishing, this issue is only going to get bigger in years to come.

Condolences, Steve. I look forward to reading the “Letter to Mel...” when it is published. We're all learning in this New Media world.

Cold from fire, hot from ice

A week of extremes.

Cooking on Monday night, I should have paid more than passing notice to the slight whiff of burning-plastic-smell in the kitchen while I was cooking. I presumed it was something on the cooktop giving off fumes. When I picked up the two-handled saucepan in which I had been boiling the rice, however, I discovered that what had been heating up had been one of the handles. Hand burning. Let go of handle. Saucepan falls to stovetop water splashes boilingwaterfliesupintomyface. It is always particularly disturbing to hear the scream of a man when you realise it is your own voice.

Fortunately I was wearing glasses at the time, which prevented the boiling water getting in my eyes. My lower face however was scalded. Being well-educated kiwis who are taught to know such things, Bronwyn and my housemates made me follow good burn management procedures: 10 minutes of running (ice cold) tap water from our shower nozzle was directed at my face, till I was numb with cold. After that, a 10 minute break to prevent frostbite. Almost as soon as I stopped I could feel the sting of the burn again. Then back to another 10 minutes of running icy H-two-0h. Pause. (Rinse.) Repeat. In all, 30 minutes of running water were applied, hunched over the bath, over the next hour. After the final dose as the numbness cleared the stinging was noticeably reduced. A couple of days later, I'm still a little sensitive around the goatee, and my lips are dried out which I think is from the burns, but I'm fine and the numbness from my treatment is fading!

Last night I went out with my workmates from one of the teams I work in, 1.5 days a week. Our longest serving therapist, Kerryn, is leaving to go back to South Africa and this is her last week. For her send off, we went out for dinner and then headed down to Guildford to go ice skating! I'd been just once before, many years ago with friends Craig and Nigel in Christchurch. I was pretty pants (it's an English expression, live with it), but had a good time. I did manage to hit the ice, roll and hydroplane at one point, which was exciting, but otherwise had to content myself with wobbling round the rink. Surprising finding: you get really hot when you're ice skating. Who would have thought?

Kerryn's departure is sad and I will miss her, though it'll be nice for her to be home. She is the longest serving therapist in our team (she's an OT). She's in fact been filling her current position for 18 months now, as a locum because the hospital hasn't been able to recruit a permanent staff member in all that time! Even though I feel like a new arrival round here, with her departure I become the longest serving member of the therapy staff there. (Not so in my other team, which is much more stable.) Even worse, it is possible that I will be the only member of that current team that is still around by 1 June, with various other posts being currently filled by locums or being junior staff that rotate. Bizarre. The NHS is doing what they can to recruit new staff though, with a broad advertising campaign underway... This illuminated Bus Stop sign reminds us that, (as I'm sure you already know), “being a Maxillo-Facial Prosthetist is a fulfilling and rewarding career.” No doubt true. I am, however, pleased to have not required the services of one after my cooking incident on Monday. No doubt if I had seen one, she would have been a locum.

Learning the family business

This morning Bronwyn and I were welcomed as official members of Worple Road Church, where we've been attending for nearly a year. This was simply recognition of the mutual commitment between us and this part of the local Christian community.

As part of this welcome, Bronwyn and I each took five minutes to share the stories of our walk with God so far. Here's what I said...

Yearnings

I want to do more photography (ohh, and this). I want to a be a competent therapist. I want to live in effortless calorie balance. I want to experience a spiritual and intellectual renaissance.

I want to give my cake to the poor and eat it too. I'd like to discover poetry. I want to experience short-term mission (can anyone recommend good agencies that coordinate this?) but I want to make a contribution, not be a spiritual tourist/voyeur. It would be great to be aerobically fit for the first time in my life. I want to be a good husband. I'd like to be passionate about my work too.

I want to speak the truth in love. I want to complete every outstanding project I have, by the end of 2004. I want my life to speak of the work of God, because I'm often too scared to do so myself. I want to have the right punchline, with the perfect timing. I want to be known for my love. I want to keep in touch. I want women to be recognised as equal to men. I want to say “No”. I want to pay no attention to money. I want to have my finances well organised. I want to travel the world. I want to settle, surrounded by family and friends. I want to know all things, perfectly. I want an end to tyranny and violence.

So many things I want. But what do I need? And what does He want for me?

Nothing to say

I want to blog, but I have nothing to say. When you think about it, that's a rather strange phenomenon. Why would I want to blog then? Dave offers this link, which probably isn't pertinent. It certainly wouldn't reflect the experience of anyone around here... it would appear I am a lone blog*, crying in the wilderness? (But what am I calling people to prepare for?)

”...nothing to say” is actually why I've fairly consistently resisted giving any kind of extended talk at churches. Not to suggest church leaders have been beating down my door, exactly, more the odd comments of friends, particularly those who have occasioned the pulpit themselves. Nothing to say is actually the simplified version, soundbite for the masses. More to the point, there is something germinating but it hasn't grown yet. Perhaps it is gestating underground, or there is the merest hint of a shoot. Don't start trying to pick fruit from it yet, let it grow to maturity.

That being said, I will be talking this coming Sunday at church. Both Bronwyn and I will be giving a five minute talk, telling each of our stories of our journey with God through our lives. We're doing this following normal local practice, as we officially become members of our local church after attending there fore about ten months. Neither of us has ever actually officially become a “member” of a church before, different congregations handling these things differently. In any case, this is our statement of committment to this little community we've become a part of over the last year. We're pleased to be here. And if you're in orbit of south west London, feel free to come along on Sunday and hear us!

Anyway, what's led to all this free time to spin my mental wheels? Bronwyn and I attend a weekly home group linked to the church on a Tuesday night. As we were just on our way up the hill we got a call to say that as basically no-one else could make it tonight, the group was, shall we say, holding individually-directed sessions at locations of our own choosing. Our home group is usually focussed around reading and discussing the bible, and thinking about what it might mean in our lives today. We talk about issues that have come up for us in the week, and we pray for each other. It's a good group. As happens occasionally, our group leaders are likely to soon be moving up north, and we're all considering what we're going to do. The group is likely to be dissolved into other groups that are already running. Probably the right decision, but makes it all as much an end as just a transition. When you do go, we'll miss you Chris and Carolyn.