As many of you may know, one of my big bug-bears with liturgy is the way some Churches, including St James, lurch back to the modified traditional form of the Lord’s Prayer in services that in every other respect are in the vernacular. You may also be aware that even on the rare occasions that we use the modern form, we use the Church of England version, which typically is different from the modern form that everyone else has. The difference is in the penultimate petition where the Church of England version retains ‘Lead Us Not Into Temptation’ – which thanks to the modern understanding of ‘lead’ is a prime example of how the changes to the English language over the centuries result in a form of words that is at best obstructive to a modern audience understanding what the prayer is actually asking. Needless to say, we need to go back to the original translation, and as part of her most recent posting to her blog, Mum looks at the original text in order to try and explain what it means. Incidentally, the text of the Jim Cotter version of the prayer that she mentions, which is included in the New Zealand Prayer Book too can be found here.
Monthly Archives: February 2007
CERN Tour – Big Science with some Internet History
As usual I’m a little behind with watching some of the videos I’m subscribed to. However, this afternoon I got round to watching the ScobleShow video tour of CERN near Geneva.
CERN is very much science on a big scale, with the new accelerator the Large Hadron Collider running for 27km under the mountains. Not surprisingly, to support all of this research, they’ve needed a similar level of computing resources. The two people doing most of the talking on the video are Ben Segal and Jean-François Groff, who were both involved in key parts of the story of the birth of the World Wide Web along with Tim Berners-Lee. Ben Segal was key in introducing TCP/IP into the organisation, and at one point in the video talks about the significant internal arguments that took place over using the North American protocol over European alternatives. Jean-François Groff worked with Tim Berners-Lee on the first browser and the underlying protocol.
Alongside the history, you also get a bit of background as to the main work at CERN looking around the on site museum. The video then finishes with a look at the data centre, with a discussion of quite how much the contents of the data centre have changed. Definitely an interesting video.
St James Italian Evening
So tonight we had the St James Italian Evening in aid of the Conservation Fund.
The evening was an absolute sell out – in fact more than that as there was no stage for the choir this time as a number of regular attendees at these events missed out on tickets, so the decision was made to put in another table, plus the social committee had their own table next to the kitchen rather than come in and eat with everybody else.
After feedback from the English and Welsh evenings held in previous years, the choir did slightly less, giving more time for chat – although since things didn’t actually get going until well after 8pm, we still didn’t finish until just before 11pm. The food as always was excellent with a home-made Tomato and Basil Soup, followed by Lasagne (also home-made) and a Fresh Fruit Salad with cream.
The choir did our usual mix on these events of serious items, plus some more light-hearted items. So at one point the gentlemen of the choir serenaded the ladies with a love song and roses – however we didn’t quite get the positive response we were hoping for…
Later on we did a version of O Sole Mio, which was absolutely straight until the end, when we seamlessly switched into what are now the much more well known lyrics of the Cornetto advert as a thinly disguised excuse to give out ice creams to the audience.
Amongst the serious items we did the Humming Chorus from Madame Butterfly, and two extracts from The Gondoliers by Gilbert and Sullivan.
Anyway, it seems like everybody had a great time, and hopefully a goodly amount of money for the Conservation Project was raised. Although I took my camera along, Paul was there taking pictures – and since I was singing for much of it, I’ve borrowed his set of pictures instead! By the way, the next event will be a Time and Talents day which is being held on March 10th – I suspect that I’ll be offering some of my time to sort out peoples computer problems.
Housing and Commuting
We had an interesting comparison last night, when we watched this weeks Relocation, Relocation which we had recorded on Wednesday, and last nights Money Programme, called Dream Commuters.
Relocation, Relocation this week was about Vikki and James who were looking for the dream location of a four bedroom semi-rural property in the Thames Valley that was commutable to London – basically the area around where we live. They had a budget of £380,000 – and as anyone who lives around here will tell you, that isn’t enough – in fact nowhere near. Needless to say, Phil and Kirsty, the presenters struggled to find anything to show them. In the end it was a combination of within budget properties that didn’t meet the spec, or within spec properties that were over budget. Ultimately the buyers compromised and bought a three bedroom semi-detached house, in the village of Woodcote in Oxfordshire, ticking the semi-rural and transport boxes, but not the rest.
The Money Programme on Dream Commuters was also locally based, with two of the three examples of long distance commuters working for eMapSite whose office is about a mile away on the corner of the Reading Road just by the bridge over the Blackwater into Hampshire. Both the CTO Justin Saunders, and one of his developers John Powell live outside the UK, Justin in rural South-West France and John in Barcelona. The programme showed Justin making his Friday night commute home on the EasyJet flight from Gatwick to Toulouse, on which the presenter got the cabin crew to ask the passengers to raise their hands if they were regular commuters on the route – to which about half the plane it seemed put up their hands. Since by buying his tickets well in advance Justin said that they are only costing £38, you can understand the attraction. When alongside that he also revealed that having sold their two bedroom cottage in Surrey for £285,000 they had bought their current £180,000 property – a five bedroom riverside house with swimming pool and separate cottage that was about the same size as their old UK house, you can understand why the move is so appealing. Thanks to the benefits of high-speed internet, both men were still able to access their company computers back in the UK.
The possibility of moves out of the Thames Valley can also work in the UK, for example one of our development team at work is currently in the process of moving up to Cambridgeshire, where he can get a much larger house in a semi-rural location to replace his town centre property in Bracknell. Thanks to the village he is moving to having high speed internet, he can remotely connect to the company network, and work just as well from Cambridgeshire as he does from Wokingham.
The stories of stretched budgets, and people moving away to get a better standard of living ring true with many people living around here. Taking a look at the Priced Out campaign pages you can see quite how much in real terms people have been affected. The site includes a calculator to allow you to work out whether you’d be able to afford your first house today, which uses trends to work out what the equivalent salary and house prices would be today. The site also tries to explode the myth that rising house prices are good if you are a house owner, and that houses are somehow more affordable now – something that TV presenters like Phil and Kirsty are often accused of implying.
The site highlights that homes are not more affordable today – mortgages are thanks to historically low interest rates – something that could change if rates continue to rise. It also highlights that the only people who benefit from high house prices are the people who can realise the growth of the investment, so investment buyers and people who are trading down in house size. Everybody else, who when they move is wanting to move somewhere bigger, has a more difficult time as the growth in the market stretches the rungs in the property ladder, making just as difficult for those already on the ladder to afford to make the step up – just the issue myself and Beth found recently. For more information on house prices today, take a look at the graphs on the HousePriceCrash website (no prizes for guessing what they think is going to happen) especially take a look at this graph of house prices against earnings since 1953 to see the extent of the problem.
Are the Railways Safe?
So this morning, after the derailment of a high-speed express train heading from London to Glasgow, we are getting the inevitable comments from people that they aren’t going to travel by train because it’s unsafe – but is it.
To be honest, the first feelings I had when I saw the pictures, which thanks to the rural area in which the accident occurred didn’t start appearing until first light, were ones of amazement at both how in tact the train was, and also how few serious injuries there were. The train had been travelling at almost 100mph when it left the track – possibly after crossing a set of points, but the enquiry has yet to determine this as the cause. The train then came off the track bed, plunging down the side of the embankment. The momentum of the train means that the front few carriages of the train were spun around, and ultimately leaving only the last few carriages of the train upright. (The BBC has a good annotated picture showing the crash site.) However 90% of the 180 passengers walked away from the scene. Of the twenty or so passengers who needed hospital treatment five were seriously hurt, and one woman died. Comparing the scenes of crumpled carriages often seen after major crashes such as this, all of the carriages of the train from last night are in tact, even those that plunged off the embankment. This is surely a testament to the safety of modern train rolling stock compared to the older stock elsewhere that for example in the Ufton Nervet crash in 2004 crumpled in the impact.
It’s also worth remembering that the reason there is so much attention for this crash is that it is relatively rare – this is the first serious train crash in five years. Although when you see a list of rail crashes since 1950, as the BBC has helpfully published today, the total number killed in that entire period is less than the thousands killed on our roads every year. Just consider what would happen to a car on a motorway if it left the road and went down an embankment at nearly 100mph…
So whilst it is shocking to see pictures of the wreckage of the train, and of course we need a thorough investigation of the cause, we have to remember that rail travel is still probably the safest way to travel in the UK.