This year’s theme is Earth in support of the International Year of Biodiversity and the What on Earth project – an initiative ‘encouraging everyone to get outside into their gardens and local parks and take photos of the wildlife they don’t recognise’. If you come across something unusual (or not so unusual) head over to www.whatonearth.org.uk armed with your image and get it identified by a team of scientific experts. If anyone can help me out with the name of this flower I’d appreciate it:

I’ve also uploaded an image of some flowers to the site, which I grew last year. I’m desperate to know the name of them. If you have any suggestions please add an identification.

The program of events for the NSEW (mostly free and open to the public) includes a David Allen-Booth Memorial Lecture entitled Shapes and Patterns: Crystals, leaves, leopards and zebras by Professor Gillian Gehring, What on Earth… will we do about energy? by staff and students from the Mechanical Engineering Subject Group (Sheffield Hallam) and the return of Rock Around the General Cemetery.

The University Library in collaboration with the National Fairground Archive will also be taking part to celebrate the engineering feats of fairgrounds and roller coasters. I’m really excited about this one because we’ve been trying to think of ways to encourage our students to make use of this amazing resource for ages. Once the display is up I’ll get more details posted up here.

In general:

9/11?
The ‘War on Terror’ (i.e. two unjustified unending wars)?
America’s first black President?
Iran’s disputed elections?
The Large Hadron Collider?
The horrific Mumbai terror attacks?
The death of Michael Jackson?
Global warming?
Google?
The Indian Ocean tsunami?
Swine flu?

(notice a theme?)

Personally:

A whole load a shit and not so much shit.

It’s pretty difficult to watch given the inclusion of extremely graphic images depicting the carnage that left at least 173 dead and a further 308 injured but an excellent documentary nonetheless. They’ve done remarkably well in reconstructing the group’s movements across the city and collating detailed descriptions of the plot that took the city of Mumbai hostage for three days.

It makes me question what the Indian authorities were doing at the time during these intercepted telephone conversations, was there contact with Pakistani administration? Were they able to trace the calls to find any further information out about the ‘controllers’? What has been/is being done to identify the leaders of the mob and how will Lashkar-e-Taiba be held accountable? What is to come of the Kasab trial (the sole surviving terrorist caught by the Indian forces and currently held in custody) given that on May 6th he pleaded not guilty to 86 charges? Surely there is enough evidence here which says otherwise?

And finally was it really appropriate for the Dispatches team to end the documentary with the ‘controller’s’ message to the media? – ‘this was just the trailer. wait for the rest of the film’.

There are 28 days left on the 4oD platform to catch-up or see Youtube’s five part break down:

• Part 1;
• Part 2;
• Part 3;
• Part 4;
• Part 5.

If you’re still not convinced though have a quick peek at this Channel 4 News report for a taster:

However, I think it’s important to say that this is a machine translation and of course it’s not perfect. But it’s a start and it means it can be developed and evolve into a practical solution for the spread of information. And, with respect to the theme of my dissertation it may in fact be used as another strategy to overcome online censorship, through enabling Iranians to translate English into Persian.

Facebook are also in on the action and the launch of Apple’s latest iPhone software has introduced support for the Persian script – Read more about this on Is This Ta’arof?.

Twitter has in fact been so useful to Iranians tweeting the ‘revolution’ that scheduled maintenance was put back a day to keep communication open. My only criticism over the last couple of days is the difficulty to sieve through the millions of uninformative re-tweets and misinformation to actually get to the heart of what I want to know – what is happening right now!

Below are some links I’ve found useful over the last couple of days:

• For some great Twitter feeds see: persiankiwi/StopAhmadi/mousavi1388 and Change for Iran;
• For good Twitter round-up tools see: Twazzup and PicFog for images;
• For a round up of the larger context of the Iranian elections see: Revolutionary Flowerpot;
• For a collection of some amazing photographs see: Mousavi1388/TheStyx/Boston’s Big Picture and The Guardian;
• For some general Fisking see: Iran Erupts/Ahamdinejad whips crowd/Iran’s day of destiny and Fear has gone;
• For a bit about elections and democracy see: Christopher Hitchens;
• For some rally footage the best place was always going to be YouTube: BBC Persian/a brave female Iranian kicks police and 15th June crowds;
• For some Guardian Analysis see: election statistics and shots fired;
• For some live tweeting I kept up with Andrew Sullivan’s commentary at: The Daily Dish;
• For some expert analysis from Gary Sick and Karim Sadjadpour see: PBS;
• As always Channel 4 News have been right on! See: Lindsey Hilsum’s blog (she is the international editor for Channel 4 News and is currently reporting from Iran) esp. ‘A day in Iran.‘;
• Good blogs include: For a democratic secular Iran (he was also on Channel 4 News and the BBC)/The Huffington Post and The Lede blog;
• And also see the Channel 4 news broadcasts including nation in turmoil and violence at protest.

Update:

Speaking of Aliens, here’s a rather bizzare story from The Sun – Man, 30, gives ‘birth’ to his twin.

Sun Yaoting was 8 when his father castrated him with a single swoop of a razor. The year was 1911, and China was in turmoil. Just a few months later rebels deposed the emperor, overturned centuries of tradition and established a republic.

Pretty gruesome eh? Not only did Sun endure a lifetime of incontinence and sexual frustration but in fear of punishment during the Cultural Revolution his family disposed of his pickled ‘three precious’ denying him the right to return to earth as a ‘complete man’. Despite the imperial overthrow Sun earned a place in Chinese history by becoming the last eunuch to the puppet monarch Puyi, before his death in 1966.

Living his later life tending to Beijing’s temples with his adopted son and grandson he eventually died in 1996. Jia Yinghua’s biography of Sun (The Last Eunuch of China: The Life of Sun Yaoting) has recently been translated into English, based on over one hundred hours of conversations and apparently contains ‘everything you might want to know about the gruesome particulars of becoming a eunuch, along with much you probably would not want to know’. Grim, but I’m sure very interesting nevertheless

As much as I enjoy the blog I look forward to the print edition hitting the door mat and continually use all back issues for reference and inspiration.

Rubbish rubbish rubbish.

From the Crafters behind Craft:

Two and a half years ago, inspired by the DIY creativity of a growing number of indie crafters, we launched CRAFT Magazine along with its companion website, Craftzine.com. Since then, we’ve become an integral part of the new craft community. We’ve been fully committed to encouraging more people to discover the joy of crafting.

All along, we have noticed that Craftzine.com has been growing steadily. At the same time, we’ve come to realize that there were more and more challenges in publishing CRAFT as a print magazine, especially with the costs of print and distribution rising, and diminishing interest among advertisers in print. So we’ve decided that Volume 10, our Celebrate Like Crazy issue, will be our last print issue and that the future of CRAFT is online.

Creating a print magazine was a great pleasure for all of us on our amazing team, and we’ve appreciated the many readers who told us how much they enjoyed CRAFT. Our print magazine helped to gain recognition that craft is thriving today, more than ever. We’re going online exclusively with CRAFT because that’s where we can best reach and serve our audience.

On Craftzine.com, we have a talented team, led by Natalie Zee Drieu, who is returning from maternity leave. She’s excited to expand our efforts online. We have a lot of work to do to bring the best of the magazine to the website but the team has started to pursue that goal. We will focus on bringing you more craft projects, just as the print magazine did but we’ll be able to do so with greater frequency. We want CRAFT online to be visually appealing and easily accessible; we want it to be fun but also useful. CRAFT will continue to venture into new territory, creating projects that integrate high tech wizardry and high fashion.

I also want to assure you that craft and crafters will continue to be an important part of the program for Maker Faire. We have always regarded crafters as we do makers, a creative vanguard who are remaking the world in ways that are especially vital today. Also, we will continue to publish MAKE magazine in print. The closure of CRAFT in print allows us to focus our limited resources on growing a single DIY magazine instead of two.

As we’ve talked to some of CRAFT’s contributors and advertisers about our decision, we felt that they understood why we made the decision. Nonetheless, the initial reaction is one of disappointment. I suspect many subscribers will feel the same way. However, as we talked about the future with all these stakeholders, they also became as excited as we are about the possibilities. I look forward to exploring what lies ahead. I hope you will join us as we share our deep interest in, and appreciation for, the diverse approaches to CRAFT on craftzine.com.

The United States of America’s 44th President.

Read more about them:

I Save Lives;
Facebook Group – Kamiar and Arash Alaei Information Group;
Tackling Iran’s Heroin Habit;
Free the Docs;
Wikipedia.