Photography; and longevity of web content
When I first started putting stuff online, I made a habit of posting regular picture galleries. Looking back at them today I cringe; the photos are small and poor quality (by all appropriate definitions of "quality").
But it's like learning any skill. I've got better at photography over the years, and still have so much to learn. No doubt I will look back on 2008's pictures in 2015, and wonder why on earth I thought they were worth posting anywhere.
What bothers me, though, is this whole "posting" online aspect. Longevity of web content is something that's really playing on my mind these days. That's why, after so many years of abandoning my own home-grown photo galleries and depending solely on Flickr, I'm going to start posting galleries - and summary pages like this one - here on gilest.org again. I can at least be sure that pages like this, and photos stored on my paid-for web space, will be backed up and looked after (by me).
I'll still use Flickr, of course. But this is my backup. I don't expect my Flickr archive to be around when my kids or grandkids have grown up, but there's at least half a chance that the stuff I curate for myself will be available to them, one way or another.
16 October 2008
Thursday, October 16, 2008
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A big day for Barney
One aspect of modern parenthood is ensuring your children can do all the things that all their friends can do. If the rest of the class can swim, your child must swim too. And if they can ride their bikes, so must yours.
The swimming's not been a problem (I took Barney to the pool every week from a very young age; he's very confident in the water now). But I've had sleepless nights worrying about the cycling.
Most of his friends have been able to cycle for a year or so. Last summer, when we took him for cycling practice in a local car park, it was a near disaster. He was upset that his pals were so much better on a bike than he was. I was upset that he was upset. And I was utterly out of breath after running alongside him for 15 minutes.
Today we had not much else to do, and the weather was too grim for a fun outing. Late in the afternoon, after he'd spent hours on the living room floor building stuff with Lego, I suggested a session of cycling practice. He said OK. I prepared myself for more getting-out-of-breath.
So off we trekked to the local secondary school, which has a large, flat car park. Not much of our town is flat, and learning to ride a bike on a slope is much more difficult. The school car park is not only flat, but also devoid of cars on a sleepy, drizzly Sunday afternoon. Perfect.
There in the car park, I held the bike firm while B climbed on, and gingerly started jogging as he started pedaling. Then I let go, and he accelerated ahead of me - and that was that. He was riding his bike. He had a HUGE grin on his face, echoed only by the huge grin on mine, which got occasionally hidden as my hand reached up to wipe a tear of pride from my eye.
I have the vaguest of memories of my own learning-to-ride moment. They are so vague, and so cliched, that I worry I might be have conjured them up in my imagination years ago, and they've just stayed with me ever since. In my mind, I'm about six (the same age Barney is now), and I'm cycling on the road outside our house. My brother is watching, helping and encouraging me. The stabilisers have only just been removed, and less than a minute later I'm hurtling down the road on just two wheels, and I've got that same HUGE grin on my face.
I can't say for sure that my memory is accurate, but fiction or not it has stayed with me, and today it came rushing back into my mind as little B flew round and round the school car park, grinning his HUGE grin and utterly, utterly pleased with himself.
I'm so proud. I'm so proud. He's MY boy, and he can ride his bike.
5th October 2008
Sunday, October 05, 2008
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The mystery of the Fan Hir glacier
This green smudge doesn't look like much, but it's an example of many similar sites in a certain part of south Wales that have had geologists and geographers arguing for years.
What you're looking down on is the eastern flank of Fan Hir, a sandstone lump in the Brecon Beacons (map). The Google marker labeled "A" is the steep talus slope of the mountain side; the smaller label to the east (on the right) is a lower ground feature, an elongated hill running parallel with Fan Hir's eastern flank for about a kilometre.
The geographical argument has been centered on how this elongated echo got there.
It's a relatively recent addition to the landscape, laid down during the last real cold snap our planet suffered before the relative warmth of the Holocene. This cold snap wasn't cold enough to bring an ice sheet clattering over the UK as previous ones had, but it was cold enough to result in localised glaciers at higher altitudes. The higher parts of the Beacons were just high enough, and cold enough, to play host to dozens of little glaciers, most of them perched on the side of the a slope like this.
So what is this long, thin, landform? Is is a glacial moraine (a mound of debris left behind by a moving glacier)? Or is is the result of rock debris falling over a massive pile of snow and accumulating at its base?
For years, the argument went one way or the other. Dr Richard Shakesby of Swansea University has settled it once and for all (he says) by studying the site and pointing out the following:
- clasts (stones) in the landform are heavily striated; striations can only be caused by the stones being dragged along the ground by ice. So it wasn't a massive snowdrift.
- if it was debris that had bounced down a snowdrift, where did the debris come from? The summit of Fan Hir hasn't been eroded enough for this theory to make sense.
But there was still another problem with the glacier theory. This glacier was on an east-facing slope, moving eastwards and southwards. This goes against all theory for UK glaciers; no matter how awful you might think our weather is, we get enough sunshine to force most glaciers to face the north, so they can keep out of the sun as much as possible. If the Fan Hir glacier was moving south, how come it didn't get melted into oblivion by the sun?
The answer Shakesby gives is amusingly simple: it kept getting topped up with fresh snow. Snow that had fallen on the flat sandstone top of Fan Hir would get wafted eastwards by the prevailing westerly winds. The fresh fluffy flakes would fall off the the eastern edge of Fan Hir, straight down on our plucky glacial friend. Yes, the sun had a melting effect; but the wind fought back and supplied the glacier with enough raw material for it to expand and grow.
And so it slid its way southwards along Fan Hir, grinding the rocks below as it went, and leaving behind this elongated moraine - small compared to Fan Hir itself, but huge on a human scale.
Why am I telling this story? Because geography is what we build nations, cities and cultures upon. Because geography is tangible, landscapes matter, they are historical evidence you can clamber over and dig your fingers into. (Lift your mud-caked fingernails to your face, and smell the geology.) Because I adore exploring places and trying to understand their history, how they came to be what they are now, and what they were before. Because climbing mountains, and understanding what made them the shape they are, is fun.
I've just added "walk to fan hir" to my todo list. Fancy coming along?
Sunday, October 05, 2008
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