The Plum Tree Exposed to the Time Vortex

There's a new Doctor Who series starting tomorrow and we get to see Peter Capaldi taking on the mantle of the time traveler.  Yes, Doctor Who has regenerated again to cheat death.  If only that could happen in real life, eh?

Well, on our allotment plot we might have a plum tree that, like the good Doctor, has been exposed to the Time Vortex and can regenerate when it is time to meet its maker.  And meet its maker is exactly what it has done this summer.  It was lush and green in the Spring, flowered profusely, fruits appeared and then suddenly one weekend its looking like this:

The leaves have shriveled, turned brown and dropped off.  The fruits remain and are slowly rotting on the branches.  We thought it had been weedkillered (which is a bit odd as we're organic so don't use weedkiller) but raspberries and brambles around it are still fine.  Whatever has afflicted it, this tree is a goner.

Except it has started on its own regeneration.  Yes, like a Time Lord, this tree is cheating death by regenerating.  Just a little way away from the scene of death and destruction is this:

That's a little new plum tree.  There are no other plum trees close by so this is almost certainly coming up from the roots of the dead tree.  In its dying breath it appears to have pushed up into new life!

However unlike Doctor Who, this new plum is in the middle of a path so its going to have a very short regeneration....

Notes on the July 2014 Great Central Railway shareholders AGM

NOTE: These notes are just what I managed to jot down during the meeting.  They aren't in any way a formal, official record of the meeting - that's what the company secretary does.  I try to capture the main points of the meeting but I apologize if I've misrepresented anything (I'm sure the GCR Board will correct me if I have got something wrong!).

Great Central Railway AGM 12th July 2014

Meeting opened by David Morgan at 10.29am

Standing room only - some of the chairs were out on a train! Introduced Malcolm (new auditor), Caroline Mate (now company secretary) and Lili Tavener. Apologies from Bill Ford who was taken ill whilst on holiday in Scotland. Handed over to Peter Morley (now ex-company secretary) to explain report and accounts. Peter passed to Malcolm to give the auditors report first. Malcolm said the auditors opinion on the accounts was that we have a "clean audit report" and the report and accounts give a clear and accurate view of the company's financial position, which is in profit this year.  The director's report was in a slightly different format from the past with a strategic view that is a government requirement with a short director's report giving the traditional set of notes on the accounts.  The accounts and underlying data provided to the auditors was as they would have expected and didn't provide any difficulty to the auditors.

Peter Morley said that the page at the back of the accounts showing the overall profit and loss is the really important one.  We're in profit this year and it takes a relentless effort from everyone at the railway to keep the kind of momentum required going.  We've had a substantatial level of growth in events and catering, with catering now over £1.1m of income from the various outlets around the railway.  The railway needs to keep costs under control in order to maintain such a profit in the future.  Bill Devitt has been promoting external contracts which has resulted in a year-on-year income increase, often with limited costs.  The overall income is now at £2.6m, and we're approaching £3m turnover, which is up from £1.6m in 2008.  This is significant growth that represents the amazing efforts made by many to make the railway go from strength to strength.

The downside is that costs are also increasing, with coal & oil costs constantly increasing due to global prices.  We can try to buy the best we can and use the most efficient locomotives, but the cost pressures are always there. Total expenditure is close to total income. A operating loss is turned into a profit from revenue grants and depreciation.  Revenue grants are from bodies outside the GCR who pay to have events put on.  The directors expected a loss of £100K so were pleased with a £10K profit.  Net assets has grown up to £1.6M thanks to share sales and little bit of the profit (up from £1M in 2008).  This growth shows that share income isn't just flowing out in payments.  Net current liabilities is showing £10K, whereas 6 years ago it was -£500K, which means that the railway is now living within its means.

Q: How are we showing on the results to date for the first quarter of current year?
A: Income is still growing at 12-15% which a very good sign.  We're getting good publicity and are on the crest of a wave which we need to maintain.  Ticket sales are up.

Q: Approximately how much of the increase is due to price increases?
A: During the recession we've controlled price increases. Family tickets are £25 which targets peoples on lower incomes.  Growing the customer numbers rather than increasing price per customer where possible.

Q: Drive a train incomes are down why?
A: Unknown, but could be people spending less on expensive premium products during the recession.

Nigel Harris (ex-director) said that it was a fantastic acheivement to turn £500K in net current liabilities into £10K profit, especially during a recession.

Report and accounts approved by the shareholders.

Election and re-election of directors.  Dennis Wilcox, Fellow of institute of Mech Eng, emeritus professor at Sunderland Uni and editor of Mainline magazine.  Proposed and elected to the board.  Two other directors retired by rotation and were re-elected.

Auditors reappointed by the shareholders.

Mike Gregory, president of the company, then spoke briefly, thanking staff, volunteers and shareholders for their help in achieving what the GCR has become. Things have improved over the last 5 years... what will it be like in 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? Hopefully better and stronger still. Please keep supporting us and continue to make the GCR the People's Railway.

Tom Ingall then gave one of his classic presentations on the current state of the railway and projects around it. Leicester museum partnership - proposal to build third annex of NRM down by Leicester North station.  Lost out on first round of HLF funding but the team aren't knocked back and are gojng back for the second round.  The team have business plans and documentation ready to go.  LCC have advised not to share details of land acquisitions, etc.  However V2 Green Arrow would be the star of the show at the museum, with interpretation telling the story of how the locomotives and railway tie in with people.  Butler Henderson is also likely to come, and Barrow Hill (where it currently is located) know this as it would mean it would have a much better environment to be preserved in than their round house.  Barnum carriage restoration would happen in front of visitors. APT-E and Woodhead electrics planned to go there.  The Unique Selling Point for the museum is the juxtaposition of the carefully curated museum displays with the working heritage railway next door.  There'll be extra track required.  Its not just big objects like locomotives and carriages though - smaller objects like shovels and uniforms will be on display as well.  It will show what differences the coming of the railways (not just the GCR - other lines covered too!) affected the lifes of people in the area.  The overall project is £15M and the first round failed HLF bids was £10M so we'd need to find £5M ourselves.  Whilst the bid failed it was viewed as a strong bid and just pipped at the post by Nottingham Castle who had a urgent need for the money immediately as they had subsidence.  More surveys and engagement will be made before the bid document is resubmitted at the end of November, with the decision made in April.  We have two more chances for HLF (maximum of three submissions for any one bid).

Bridging the Gap.  Two years ago the scheme wasn't coming together but now it is.  Tom said hopefully this may be the last AGM when there isn't a bridge over the MML.  Bridge was taken away in 1980s to make room for electrification. We have a cost of £1m to reinstate the bridge which is limited lifetime opportunity given to us by Network Rail.  The GCR is in partnership with NR and they have been doing a tremendous amount of work. Consultant engineers on board to make sure that the project is done right. NR have employees who are volunteering for this project (its great experience for them and adds to their CVs).  We have actually had people digging on the site getting ready for the bridge - NR can do ground investigations that we couldn't even afford the insurance to do!  Soil sampling shows that it will need to be a few metres closer to St Pancras than it used to be to get the best possible alignment. This also means one signal gantry doesn't have to move which reduces the costs somewhat.  Concrete abutments and middle pier, both of which will have blue brick slips facing them.  Single track with a walkway on one side - CBC wanted walkways on the sides at one point.  Reading bridge decks have already had old water proofing removed, ready for shot blasting, repairs and replating.  Signal sighting on NR has already been done.  Construction is likely to start during the Xmas shutdown, with pile driving being the major first job (which may well take the whole of the Xmas period, in which case the bridge will go in later in 2015 or even 2016).  Currently raised £535K in one year - funding coming from all over the world.  Need to reach £750K in a few months time - send that money in now!  NR are pleased to be involved in the project - Tom read out a great positive statement from NR thanking everyone involved.

The local growth deal fund has awarded us a £1M grant towards reunification. We can only draw £500K at a time (ie at most once per year) and is match funded against us raising the £1M we need for the MML bridge (this can't be used in the timescale for the MML bridge so we still need to keep on raising funds for that anyway).  This could be used for the canal bridge, embankment and railway terrace bridge.  This week the canal bridge has undergone a survey - worth £10K but done for considerably less than that.  When the numbers are crunched this will tell us how much the canal bridge restoration will cost and how it will be done.  Tom said that there is an element of "organised chaos" as the plan will evolve as we get new data, funding, equipment and resources donated to us. Tom asked us to all go out and fund raise - don't ask for permission from the GCR to run events but just do it and send the money back in!

Q: Are they any thoughts about having a GCR advert on the bridge.
A: Can't have it facing the tracks.  Could be on the abutments but would require extra planning permission.  Good idea though as its "prime retail space". ;-)

Q: When making press releases about £1M should we make it clearer that it doesn't cover the MML bridge?
A: Its in the press releases but its important that everyone realises this and spreads the message that we still need to raise the £465K for the MML.  Don't stop fund raising and making donations to the bridge fund!

Q: What's happening to the Workington Engine Shed?
A: Bits of it survive and GCR would like to incorporate them into a future building?  Talking to the GCR(N) but there are still many unknowns.  The joining up of the Mountsorrel Branch is seen almost a dress rehersal for joining with the GCR(N).

Q: Is there an overall cost for the whole Bridging the Gap project?
A: Tom said approximately £6.5M - railway terrace bridge & embankment will be expensive.

Q: Once the canal bridge is refurbished could we advertise to boaters to get them to come to the GCR?
A: Yes that's a great idea.  No detail plans on how it would be done yet - many things need working out first.

Q: What about Loughborough High Level station?
A: Its an aspiration still but no concrete plans yet. Not ruled out by current bridging plans.

Q: Where will be engine shed move to?
A: Tom not privy to that as he's not on the board.  One suggestion is to have a facility on the western side of the existing loco shed (where the stores containers are).  Lili said that consultant engineers have been asked about location of loco shed based on new alignment required for bridging the gap.  Once joined with the GCR(N) there's opportunities to have engineering facility in Ruddington.

Q: There's quite a large pot of money at East Midlands Airport community pot - could it be tapped?
A: Yes.  Lili said that as well as the Gap and the museum we also need smaller grants for other projects on the railway.  Someone pointed out that we already have had EMA money for the lift in Loughborough.  David Morgan said anyone with information on grant givers should contact Lili or the railway with details.

Q: What implications does the Leicester North museum have on Loughborough Central museum?  Look at how Kent and East Sussex railways are joining.  Why does the shareholders meeting start before the first train on the GCR arrives at Loughborough?
A: The last point is taken on board - maybe we should run a DMU or an early morning "milk train" next year.  Tom said that he didn't forsee the Loughborough museum disappearing - the Leicester North museum is an outstation of the NRM whereas our own award winning museum has its own stock.

Q: There's a very early Brush electric loco in the NRM - could it come to the museum?
A: Tom said the museum stock list hasn't been released yet so it could be included.  Someone also suggested that they know of a Brush built steam loco located in west Leicestershire.

Meeting expressed its thanks to Network Rail for its work on the Gap project.

Q: Could the AGMs be laid out differently so that more people could see the screens?  Eg have two screens.
A: We could go back to the town hall, but that costs £2K.  Point about being able to see taken on board and they'll have to see what can be done next year.

Q: How well did the model railway exhibition do? Could we use a similar large marquee at Quorn for the AGM as there's no parking problems either.
A: Could be an idea to be looked at, but need to make sure that we don't let the costs increase (just as with everything else on the railway).

Q: We're doing a lot less trade at the weekend for the Bronze drive a train weekend - it might be that having more themed weekends means having less drive a train slots. Could there be a midweek day for Bronze drive a train experiences?
A: David asked Caroline to make a note of it.  Would be interesting to see if other railway have experienced a drop in there datex services. David Morgan said that at the last HRA managers meeting it came out that over all hertiage railway footfall has increased by 7% whereas general tourist event footfall has fallen by 6% - HRA aren't sure how railways have ducked the trend.  We're not turning many customers away at the moment though.

Q: Why single track bridge rather than double track?
A: Tom said it would cost far, far more.  Nigel Harris said that clearances are very tight and we'd have to move the brook and do lots more heavy engineering to deal with water course flows, which would be massively expensive.  Railway Terrace needs to be full height access for the tip lorries to get under.  If in the wrong place the bridge over Railway Terrace would be longer than the one over MML.  Its going to be single track... end of story.  Bottom of embankment needs to be to full flood protection standard to meet EU and Environment Agency requirements - we're lucky that the EA are happy with the current plans.

David Morgan then thanked everyone again, highlighting the efforts of Bill Ford, Richard Patching & Mike Gregory. Meeting closed at 11.56am.

Optimism and Pessimism over Carbon Reductions

This afternoon I attended an interested debate on energy policy, held at Loughborough University as part of their Impact Festival for research.  Four leading academics working on topics such as carbon capture and storage, renewable energy generation, energy efficiency in the built environment and energy policy were brought together and lead by a chap from the Energy Technologies Institute (ETI).  The ETI is a Government funded institute that encourages research and development of technologies intended to help the UK in its goal of saving 80% of its 1990  CO2 output level by 2050.

The debate was really interesting, with experts touching on a number of mechanisms that could help us reach this target, and with a bit of disagreement amongst them here and there.  Carbon Capture and Storage is seen as important given the amount of existing fossil fuelled power generation but the jury was out on whether the UK would be willing to fund it and whether China and India would have somewhere safe to put the captured carbon (one option being underground in old oil or gas wells, which isn't such a great idea in a geologically unstable area).  Some support for community involvement in renewable energy development (ie what has been happening in Germany and to some extent in the UK too).

At both the start and end of the debate they asked the audience (about 60-70 of us, a real mix of academics, students, industrialists and the general public) three questions.  Paraphrasing they were:

a) SHOULD the UK aim toward the low carbon target by 2050?
b) CAN the UK access technologies to allow the target to be reached?
c) WILL the UK actually make that reduction target.

You could answer "yes", "no" and "don't know" to each of these The answer to a) had a majority saying "yes", both at the start and end, so we mostly seemed to agree a low carbon Britain was something to aim for.  The answer to b) was a bit more mixed, with more folk seeming to move a bit more between start and end.  But the answer to c) was the most telling: the majority at the start thoughts "no" and that hardened at the end, mostly thanks to "don't knows" being converted to "no".
For what its worth, I said "yes" to a) and "don't know" to b) and c) at both ends of the debate, so I wasn't in the majority for either of the latter two questions.

But the majority answer was a great example of why politicians have a problem with supporting green policies.  They know that most folk think that these policies are a good idea, but the politicians also probably realise that most folk have already seen the mess governments (of all sizes and hues) have made of things like energy policies and now cynically don't think there's a hope of reaching the target.  The politicians thus feel free to mess around, cut and generally play short term politics with green policies and know that it isn't likely to rile people up as much as taxation, benefits or the NHS. Its a rather negative feedback loop of course, because this sort of action will just make the general public even more cynical about how likely we are to meet our targets.

Replacing CFL bulbs with LEDs

I replaced the traditional incandescent bulbs in my flat some years ago and it was a no-brainer.  The compact florescent lights (CFLs) were coming rapidly down in price, were available in all the sizes I needed and of course consumed far less energy than the other heated filament bulbs they replaced.  I was happy to be saving energy and cutting my electricity bills.  All was good with the world, even though some of the bulbs took a while to "warm up" before they gave full output. I could live with that in most places.

Scroll forward to 2013 and I've now replaced a few of the first CFL bulbs with another new technology: mains power LED bulbs.  I need to replace some of the older CFLs that had failed over the 8 or 9 years I'd had them and Tesco (of all people) had new 4W LED bulbs on special offer at around £8 per bulb.  Now that's still a lot more than CFLs (which were being given away at one point and which you can quite happily get in pound shops these days).  However I wanted to try them out as I have four down lighters in the kitchen that are used quite a bit and where I could really do with the crisper, bluer, more immediate light from the LEDs.

I thus spent £32 on replacing 4 x 14W CFLs with 4 x 4W LEDs (compared to 4x100W reflectors that were there when I moved in over a decade ago!).  I liked the light and there's no "warming up" period (or at least none that I can detect).  Whilst the LED bulbs were more expensive the energy savings of having them on for a few hours per day on a regular basis means that I should be financially in front after 5 years or so, and the LED bulbs have a much longer predicted lifespan.

With that good experience under my belt, I started to wonder if there were other bulbs I should consider replacing in my flat.  The top contenders are the lounge standard lamp that is on for a few hours every evening, my bedside light (ditto) and the outside light above my front door (which could really do with a brighter light with no warm up whilst I'm trying to go up or down my iron staircase). As a result of discussions at the Footpaths Group at Loughborough University I started to wonder what the embodied energy of the various bulbs is and that's where things got alot more complicated.

Embodied energy is the energy required to actually make and distribute the product. The more complex the processing required to make a product and/or the more raw materials requiring high energy processing, the higher the embodied energy is.  The US Government funded an analysis of the embodied energy in different types of bulbs:

• Incandescent bulbs require an average of 42MJ per 20 million lumen hours,
• CFLs require an average of 170MJ per 20 million lumen hours,
• Current LEDs require an average of 343MJ per 20 million lumen hours.

The "MJ per 20 million lumen hours" might seem to be a rather odd set of units, but it is basically used to standardise the amount of energy (MJ - mega-joules) over a fixed light output (the "per 20 million lumen hours") irrespective of the actual light output of the resulting bulbs.  This lets you compare the embodied energy required to replace, for example, a single very bright incandescent bulb with several CFLs or LEDs with lower light outputs (in lumens).

Now this looks bad for LEDs but the same report also shows the energy used actually lighting the bulbs. The traditional bulb consumes 15,100 MJ per 20 million lumen hours, the CFLs use up 3780 MJ per 20 million lumen hours and current LEDs sip just 3540 MJ per 20 million lumen hours.  This confirms that replacing traditional incandescent bulbs with either CFLs or LEDs is a good thing to do.  Even though both CFLs and LEDs have higher embodied energy, they consume about a fifth of the energy required to provide the standardised light output, and the energy used in lighting the incandescent bulbs dwarfs the embodied energy.

The tricky call is replacing CFLs with current LEDs though.  Whilst the energy used in powering the LEDs is 240MJ less per 20 million lumen hours, they require 173MJ more to make.  So they do win out in the end energy wise but the break even point comes rather late in their life.

I'm probably still going to replace my high use CFLs with LEDs.  However waiting a while may help: mains powered LEDs are still a relatively young technology and the energy use, embodied energy and prices are all likely to fall over the next few years.  My existing CFLs are still pretty good, so its probably best to wait until they break, and then make the switch to LEDs.

LibCampUK 13 - the highlights for me

I've just spent the day in the brilliant new Library of Birmingham building at the LibCampUK13 "unconference". This is a meeting of librarians, library staff, library consultants, library suppliers and even a few of us lowly techies allowed out into the light from our basements. It being an "unconference" the agenda is created on the fly on the day from things that the attendees want to talk about. Its not about presenting papers or holding workshops - its about sitting around in huddles sharing problems, telling stories and swapping ideas. Its manic, chaotic and absolutely fantastic. It being full of librarians there was also plenty of cake on hand (including a competition won by a lady who had made a superb Moomin cake).

This blog post serves by way of a memory jogger for some of the useful things I came across during the day. There was so, so, so much more than I can record here as there were five or so parallel threads going on. You were encourage to "vote with your feet" and move between threads during each session if you got bored or wanted more variety, but I found all the groups I attended engaging and so stayed put!

My first session was on social media use in libraries. This was a really popular topic - so much so that there were two separate groups discussing it simultaneously. In our group I learnt some really useful tips that the social media aware folk are using (including a lady who works for a pub chain rather than a library service!). For example tweeting events that are in your local area that you don't run but which might be of interest to your followers both gets your tweets retweeted more widely and thus attract new followers, as well as having the event organisers follow you and retweet some of your messages by way of return. Location based searches can be useful as well - see who is talking about topics you are interested in your geographic area and then target their conversations with your own replies. Social media analytics are of interest to many: can they be sure that the effort that they put into social media interactions is actually reaching the desired target markets? Keeping up with the various social media services is also an issue: although Twitter and Facebook are biggies, Pinterest, LibraryThing and Tumblr are also used (hardly anyone seems to care about Google Plus though!). Different social media are used by different groups and even age isn't a sure fire targeting mechanism (some schools say students are into Tumblr as the latest thing but another school librarian said her students viewed it as a bit last year and were all over Instagram now). Some sites have issues with some (or all!) social media being blocked - useful to bear in mind if you're trying to reach certain groups (schools and NHS especially).

After grabbing a quick coffee and trying to grab a charge on my laptop and phone, I headed upstairs to the Open Archives session. It was already in full swing when I crept in and I was surprised to hear that some educational institutions still seem to under value open archives or data repositories as a way of spreading the message about their research (despite them being happy to send data to folk who do manage to seek them out). RCUK mandates of archiving of data supporting publications and Gold/Green journal article publishing with institutional repositories is helping, as are some JISC initiatives. There's lots of active work in this area though so its a "hot topic" at the moment. One chap said he was from FE and there was a large and mostly untapped market for repositories in FE colleges. Some discussion of open data and the benefit it provides for "mash ups" (especially if library folk are hacking on open source code).

Next was lunch, followed by three more sessions. The first afternoon session I attended was on digitisation. Some interesting work being done on private digitisation initiatives, especially for things like maps (which the chap who pitched and initiated the session was really into). Some discussion on the +/- aspects of things like Google Books: I was on the +ve side as we've used it in LORLS reading lists and its been really useful and popular, but some complaints over lack of transparency on quality of OCR behind the page scans (which I can understand as that's an expensive thing to do and probably isn't Google's primary aim at the moment). Heard about a group of heritage conservation volunteers called NADFAS who had help digitise and preserve works in some special libraries (though it needs librarian input to ensure metadata about digital objects are captured).

Back in the main theatre the middle session of the afternoon I dropped into was about gadgets, a topic close to my techie heart. Most folk in the group held up smart phones or tablets and said lots of their users had them. Some talk about managers buying "iPads" without any real idea how they would be loaned out or to who. Some sites have issues with setting up shared tablets as the software eco-systems on them don't really encourage it, whereas others (ones using "bump-in-the-wire" wireless portals for network authentication) have fewer issues. I asked if other sites had any great solutions to students trailing power leads everywhere (as policies and telling them off don't really work): one chap said that even their new sofas had power sockets in the arms and all tables had power sockets. I managed to also slip in a mention that NFC capable phones/tablets can also pick up RFID tags which seemed to interest several folk!

 I then stayed put for the last session of the day which in my group was on open source. The immediately useful take home for me was Library Box, which is a content hosting wifi hotspot that I'd not come across before. Great for providing educational/library resources in "pop up" environments, especially where there isn't decent Wifi or 3G coverage (eg book events in public parks). Some discussion about appropriate open source software for managing small library catalogues: I suggested Koha but one of the facilitators suggested it was too complex for really small libraries and she'd made good use of Drupal with cataloguing extensions. Another chap was looking for suggestions for school data repositories - Dspace and Eprints were mentioned but again may be too complex to set up and maintain, whereas a CMS like Wordpress might work fine and be more familiar to school teachers.

So some great stuff there, and so much more in the other sessions I didn't get to (and probably in the bar after the meeting which I didn't go to either). LibCamp is definitely on my list to attend again next year... assuming they let Shambrarians like me slip in again!

Goodreads, Perl and Net::OAuth::Simple

Part of my day job is developing and gluing together library systems.  This week I've been making a start on doing some of this "gluing" by prototyping some code that will hopefully link our LORLS reading list management system with the Goodreads social book reading site.  Now most of our LORLS code is written in either Perl or JavaScript; I tend to write the back end Perl stuff that talks to our databases and my partner in crime Jason Cooper writes the delightful, user friendly front ends in JavaScript.  This means that I needed to get a way for a Perl CGI script to take some ISBNs and then use them to populate a shelf in Goodreads. The first prototype doesn't have to look pretty - indeed my code may well end up being a LORLS API call that does the heavy lifting for some nice pretty JavaScript that Jason is far better at producing than I am!

Luckily, Goodreads has a really well thought out API, so I lunged straight in. They use OAuth 1.0 to authenticate requests to some of the API calls (mostly the ones concerned with updating data, which is exactly what I was up to) so I started looking for a Perl OAuth 1.0 module on CPAN. There's some choice out there! OAuth 1.0 has been round the block for a while so it appears that multiple authors have had a go at making supporting libraries with varying amounts of success and complexity.

So in the spirit of being super helpful, I thought I'd share with you the prototype code that I knocked up today.  Its far, far, far from production ready and there's probably loads of security holes that you'll need to plug.  However it does demonstrate how to do OAuth 1.0 using the Net::OAuth::Simple Perl module and how to do both GET and POST style (view and update) Goodreads API calls.  Its also a great way for me to remember what the heck I did when I next need to use OAuth calls!

First off we have a new Perl module I called Goodreads.pm. Its a super class of the Net::OAuth::Simple module that sets things up to talk to Goodreads and provides a few convenience functions. Its obviously massively stolen from the example in the Net::OAuth::Simple perldoc that comes with the module.

#!/usr/bin/perl

package Goodreads;

use strict;
use base qw(Net::OAuth::Simple);

sub new {
    my $class  = shift;
    my %tokens = @_;

    return $class->SUPER::new( tokens => \%tokens,
                               protocol_version => '1.0',
                               return_undef_on_error => 1,
                               urls   => {
                                   authorization_url => 'http://www.goodreads.com/oauth/authorize',
                                   request_token_url => 'http://www.goodreads.com/oauth/request_token',
                                   access_token_url  => 'http://www.goodreads.com/oauth/access_token',
                               });
}

sub view_restricted_resource {
    my $self = shift;
    my $url  = shift;
    return $self->make_restricted_request($url, 'GET');
}

sub update_restricted_resource {
    my $self = shift;
    my $url          = shift;
    my %extra_params = @_;
    return $self->make_restricted_request($url, 'POST', %extra_params);
}

sub make_restricted_request {
    my $self = shift;
    croak $Net::OAuth::Simple::UNAUTHORIZED unless $self->authorized;

    my( $url, $method, %extras ) = @_;

    my $uri = URI->new( $url );
    my %query = $uri->query_form;
    $uri->query_form( {} );

    $method = lc $method;

    my $content_body = delete $extras{ContentBody};
    my $content_type = delete $extras{ContentType};

    my $request = Net::OAuth::ProtectedResourceRequest->new(
        consumer_key     => $self->consumer_key,
        consumer_secret  => $self->consumer_secret,
        request_url      => $uri,
        request_method   => uc( $method ),
        signature_method => $self->signature_method,
        protocol_version => $self->oauth_1_0a ?
                                   Net::OAuth::PROTOCOL_VERSION_1_0A :
                                   Net::OAuth::PROTOCOL_VERSION_1_0,
        timestamp        => time,
        nonce            => $self->_nonce,
        token            => $self->access_token,
        token_secret     => $self->access_token_secret,
        extra_params     => { %query, %extras },
        );
    $request->sign;
    die "COULDN'T VERIFY! Check OAuth parameters.\n"
        unless $request->verify;

    my $request_url = URI->new( $url );

    my $req = HTTP::Request->new(uc($method) => $request_url);
    $req->header('Authorization' => $request->to_authorization_header);
    if ($content_body) {
        $req->content_type($content_type);
        $req->content_length(length $content_body);
        $req->content($content_body);
    }

    my $response = $self->{browser}->request($req);
    return $response;
}
1;

Next we have the actual CGI script that makes use of this module. This shows how to call the Goodreads.pm (and thus Net::OAuth::Simple) and then do the Goodreads API calls:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use CGI;
use CGI::Cookie;
use Goodreads;
use XML::Mini::Document;
use Data::Dumper;

my %tokens;
$tokens{'consumer_key'} =  'YOUR_CONSUMER_KEY_GOES_IN_HERE';
$tokens{'consumer_secret'} = 'YOUR_CONSUMER_SECRET_GOES_IN_HERE';

my $q = new CGI;
my %cookies = fetch CGI::Cookie;

if($cookies{'at'}) {
    $tokens{'access_token'} = $cookies{'at'}->value;
}
if($cookies{'ats'}) {
    $tokens{'access_token_secret'} = $cookies{'ats'}->value;
}

if($q->param('isbns')) {
    $cookies{'isbns'} = $q->param('isbns');
}


my $oauth_token = undef;
if($q->param('authorize') == 1 && $q->param('oauth_token')) {
    $oauth_token = $q->param('oauth_token');
} elsif(defined $q->param('authorize') && !$q->param('authorize')) {
    print $q->header, 
    $q->start_html,
    $q->h1('Not authorized to use Goodreads'),
    $q->p('This user does not allow us to use Goodreads');
    $q->end_html;
    exit;
}

my $app = Goodreads->new(%tokens);

unless ($app->consumer_key && $app->consumer_secret) {
    die "You must go get a consumer key and secret from App\n";
}       

if ($oauth_token) {
    if(!$app->authorized) {
        GetOAuthAccessTokens();
    }
    StartInjection();
} else {
    my $url = $app->get_authorization_url(callback => 'https://example.com/cgi-bin/good-reads/inject');
    my @cookies;
    foreach my $name (qw(request_token request_token_secret)) {
        my $cookie = $q->cookie(-name => $name, -value => $app->$name);
        push @cookies, $cookie;
    }
    push @cookies, $q->cookie(-name => 'isbns',
                              -value => $cookies{'isbns'} || '');
#    print $q->redirect($url);
    print $q->header(-cookie => \@cookies,
                     -status=>'302 Moved',
                     -location=>$url,
                     );
}

exit;

sub GetOAuthAccessTokens {
    foreach my $name (qw(request_token request_token_secret)) {
        my $value = $q->cookie($name);
        $app->$name($value);
    }
    ($tokens{'access_token'}, 
     $tokens{'access_token_secret'}) = 
         $app->request_access_token(
                                    callback => 'https://example.com/cgi-bin/goodreads-inject',
                                    );
}

sub StartInjection {
    my $at_cookie = new CGI::Cookie(-name=>'at',
                                    -value => $tokens{'access_token'});
    my $ats_cookie = new CGI::Cookie(-name => 'ats',
                                     -value => $tokens{'access_token_secret'}
                                     );
    my $isbns_cookie = new CGI::Cookie(-name => 'isbns',
                                       -value => '');
    print $q->header(-cookie=>[$at_cookie,$ats_cookie,$isbns_cookie]);
    print $q->start_html;

    my $user_id = GetUserId();
    if($user_id) {
        my $shelf_id = LoughboroughShelf(user_id => $user_id);
        if($shelf_id) {
            my $isbns = $cookies{'isbns'}->value;
            print $q->p("Got ISBNs list of $isbns");
            AddBooksToShelf(shelf_id => $shelf_id,
                            isbns => $isbns,
                            )
        }
    }
        
    print $q->end_html;
}

sub GetUserId {
    my $user_id = 0;
    my $response = $app->view_restricted_resource(
                                                  'https://www.goodreads.com/api/auth_user'
                                                  );
    if($response->content) {
        my $xml = XML::Mini::Document->new();
        $xml->parse($response->content);
        my $user_xml = $xml->toHash();
        $user_id = $user_xml->{'GoodreadsResponse'}->{'user'}->{'id'};
    }
    return $user_id;
}

sub LoughboroughShelf {
    my $params;
    %{$params} = @_;

    my $shelf_id = 0;
    my $user_id = $params->{'user_id'} || return $shelf_id;
    
    my $response = $app->view_restricted_resource('https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/list.xml?key=' . $tokens{'consumer_key'} . '&user_id=' . $user_id);
    if($response->content) {
        my $xml = XML::Mini::Document->new();
        $xml->parse($response->content);
        my $shelf_xml = $xml->toHash();
        foreach my $this_shelf (@{$shelf_xml->{'GoodreadsResponse'}->{'shelves'}->{'user_shelf'}}) {
            if($this_shelf->{'name'} eq 'loughborough-wishlist') {
                $shelf_id = $this_shelf->{'id'}->{'-content'};
                last;
            }
        }
        if(!$shelf_id) {
            $shelf_id = MakeLoughboroughShelf(user_id => $user_id);
        }
    }
    print $q->p("Returning shelf id of $shelf_id");
    return $shelf_id;
}

sub MakeLoughboroughShelf {
    my $params;
    %{$params} = @_;

    my $shelf_id = 0;
    my $user_id = $params->{'user_id'} || return $shelf_id;

    my $response = $app->update_restricted_resource('https://www.goodreads.com/user_shelves.xml?user_shelf[name]=loughborough-wishlist',
                                               );
    if($response->content) {
        my $xml = XML::Mini::Document->new();
        $xml->parse($response->content);
        my $shelf_xml = $xml->toHash();
        $shelf_id = $shelf_xml->{'user_shelf'}->{'id'}->{'-content'};
        print $q->p("Shelf hash: ".Dumper($shelf_xml));
    }
    return $shelf_id;
}

sub AddBooksToShelf {
    my $params;
    %{$params} = @_;

    my $shelf_id = $params->{'shelf_id'} || return;
    my $isbns = $params->{'isbns'} || return;
    foreach my $isbn (split(',',$isbns)) {
        my $response = $app->view_restricted_resource('https://www.goodreads.com/book/isbn_to_id?key=' . $tokens{'consumer_key'} . '&isbn=' . $isbn);
        if($response->content) {
            my $book_id = $response->content;
            print $q->p("Adding book ID for ISBN $isbn is $book_id");
            $response = $app->update_restricted_resource('http://www.goodreads.com/shelf/add_to_shelf.xml?name=loughborough-wishlist&book_id='.$book_id);
        }
    }
}

You'll obviously need to get a developer consumer key and secret from the Goodreads site and pop them into the variables at the start of the script (no, I'm not sharing mine with you!). The real work is done by the StartInjection() subroutine and the subordinate subroutines that it then calls once the OAuth process has been completed. By this point we've got an access token and its associated secret so we can act as whichever user has allowed us to connect to Goodreads as them. The code will find this user's Goodreads ID, see if they have a bookshelf called "loughborough-wishlist" (and create it if they don't) and then add any books that Goodreads knows about with the given ISBN(s). You'd call this CGI script with a URL something like:

https://example.com/cgi-bin/goodreads-inject?isbns=9781565928282

Anyway, there's a "works for me" simple example of talking to Goodreads from Perl using OAuth 1.0. There's plenty of development work left in turning this into production level code (it needs to be made more secure for a start off, and the access tokens and secret could be cached in a file or database for reuse in subsequent sessions) but I hope some folk find this useful.

Post nuclear differences

In the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station disaster in early 2011 both Japan and Germany changed their stance on nuclear power generation. Some nuclear plants were shut down immediately and the rest will most likely be decommissioned with the next decade.  Both countries appeared to have widespread public support for this radical change in their national energy policy.

Solar city, science park, Gelsenkirchen.
Source: Green Baroque Ins. Flickr under Creative
Commons CC BY-NC 2.0 Licence 

The effect these decisions have had on these two nations response to climate change is interesting.  Germany was already well into building out its solar & wind based renewable generation capacity before the earthquake and tidal wave wrecked the reactors in Japan. With widespread community involvement in the investment in renewables, and helpful financial and regulatory environment provided by the German authorities,  they've been able carry this forward.  They've still got fossil fuels in their mix but they do still seem to be on target for their carbon emissions targets.  Germany already had a strong anti-nuclear movement and was planning on phasing out nuclear by 2036 anyway so this event really accelerated that timetable.

Japan on the other hand have just announced during the UN COP19 climate change talks that they were going to have to substantially reduce their existing emissions reduction target.  They are building renewable generating capacity of course - practically every developed nation is.  However it will not be enough to cope with losing all the nuclear generating capacity that they are removing,  which prior to March 2011 contributed around 30% of their total generating capacity.  They are having to turn to increasing use of imported fossil fuels as oil, coal and gas to supply their electricity.

I was wondering what we could learn from the different outcomes arising from what, at first, appear to be very similar decisions.  Germany had something of a head start as they were already aggressively building solar PV & wind generators. But they also have a geographic  advantage over Japan: Germany is bigger with more land available.  Solar & wind both have low "energy density" so to get a decent amount generated you need alot of them covering lots of roofs & land. Japan is a relatively crowded country so space is at a much higher premium.  As a comparison Japan is 39th in the population density league table whereas Germany is 58th.  Japan does have potential for many gigawatts of renewable power generation though, as it has amply space in the seas around it for large scale off-shore wind farms.  There does appear to be the need to encourage more community involvement and investment in on-shore renewables though.

Fukushima Unit 4 with cranes working on 

stabilizing the site. Source: IAEA Imagebank under 

Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Licence

Both nations have to bear the costs of decommissioning their nuclear infrastructure, which will mostly likely be a long and expensive task.  Again Germany has an advantage - it only had 17 nuclear power stations operating prior to March 2011 whereas Japan had over 50.  Germany was already well into decommissioning quite a few reactors, especially from the former East Germany.

Japan also has the expense and difficulty of cleaning up Fukushima itself to deal with. That's going to be a big drain on the resources of both its owner Tepco and the Japanese government. The clean up may well be competing for funds, people and time required to ramp up construction of  renewables, even though those renewables are part of the solution to the overall problem. Indeed one wonders if the exclusion zone around Fukushima might well end up being a good place to site renewables with their relatively low maintenance requirements (so fewer people have to spend less time in the potentially more radioactive areas).  At least they might provide some economic payback to the people whose land is otherwise now worthless.

Japan's economy has taken some serious blows over the last few years, which also puts them at a disadvantage against Germany. Germany is the economic power house of the EU, and so it can afford to invest in the capital cost of renewables. Indeed its a positive cycle for the Germans: the more renewables they can invest in the more insulated they are from fossil fuel price rises, which improves their competitiveness and increases their income, part of which they can invest in more renewables.  Japan has the opposite problem - its emergency switch to large scale fossil fuels to replace the nuclear power stations is costing the Japanese power companies an extra 3.6 trillion yen in 2013 over the costs in 2010 before the disaster.  Things are likely to get worse for Japan before they start to get better.

There is one overarching "take home message" I pick up from the different reaction to the change in energy policy in the two countries.  The sooner a nation starts to make a large scale switch to distributed renewable power generation, the better placed it is likely to be to deal with sudden, external changes in traditional centralized power generation.  In this case it was the rapid removal of all nuclear capacity but in the future who knows what it will be?  Gas pipelines cut off as part of national sabre rattling? Wars leading rapid price rises in global oil prices? Coal shipments being disrupted by industrial unrest?  All of these could affect national grids that rely too heavily on one particular fuel source, especially if that fuel is controlled by others.  We all need to be investing in clean, distributed energy generation to make our nations, towns, cities and communities more resilient in the face of these unexpected changes.

Replacing Green Levies with Brown Ones

There's been much talk in the UK media and within political circles recently about the costs associated with so called "green levies".  These are additional costs added to energy bills to help fund climate change mitigations such as increased power production from renewable sources, carbon reduction strategies and the all important energy efficiency measures for low income and vulnerable groups in society.  The principle is that the more energy you use, the more you end up paying to help turn that energy generation into a cleaner, greener form and help poorer folk save energy.

Now some people are campaigning that these levies need to be reduced or removed completely and/or moved to general taxation.  The rising energy prices from the Big Six energy companies are hitting the "hard working" people of the UK and some politicians are sensing a quick, popular vote winner in appearing to do something to cut these bills.  Moving some of the green funding measures to general taxation is probably the most progressive option as it moves the cost towards those who can afford to pay more, even if they themselves have already reduced their energy demands. Of course that might be rather unpopular with people in power who tend to pay more of such taxes, and there is a bit of recent history of socially responsible tax payer funded schemes facing the axe.

But what if these green levies are removed completely and we succeed in stalling UK plc's green economy?  Not only will that affect quite a lot of jobs (many in the private section - that bit of the market place that is supposed to be pulling us out of economic doldrums) but it will also mean there will be less investment being made in climate change mitigation technologies, and we'll also end up putting a lot more CO2 into the atmosphere as a result.  We may well find that it becomes impossible to meet our legally binding targets on carbon emissions, which may have some direct economic costs if we're fined or foreign competitors manage to lock the "dirty man of Europe" out of future deals.

One argument put forward by those wishing to remove the green levies is that they don't think that climate change, global warming, call it what you will, is a man-made or even man-influenced effect.  To them it doesn't really matter how much CO2 or other greenhouse gases we emit, the climate will just do its own thing, and actually it will just fluctuate a bit and really we can all just carry on with business as usual.  Ignore the "ecomentalists" and get on with a continuation of 20th Century life into a bright, energy guzzling future.

Unfortunately people with such views currently seem to hold some of the reins of power in the UK, so there's a distinct possibility that at least some of the climate change mitigation funding may be lost.  If that does come to pass, I'd like to propose something to replace them: "brown levies".  Such levies will not be used to fund climate change mitigation strategies but instead fund climate change adaptation strategies. For example such things as building better sea defences, increasing the use of permeable paving systems in urban areas to reduce flooding, covering more of the UK countryside with polytunnels or glasshouses to reduce weather event effects on agriculture, etc, etc.

Some of that is happening now, but at a relatively low level, so the brown levy wouldn't need to be large to start with, but we do need to fund it.  At the moment what funding there is coming from disparate sources such as water bills, council taxes and general taxation, but it is hidden away rather that splashed all over the front pages.  Lets bring it out into the light as a nice, visible set of costs in the same way that the green levies have been brought centre stage by having them bundled together in energy bills.  That way people can see what they have to pay to adapt to climate change.  What goes into the levies could be given to one of Parliament's climate change committees to look after, or be debated every year in the House.

If the climate change deniers are right, the brown levies will stay small, and possibly even reduce as the climate swings naturally back to a late 19th/early 20th century.  Nothing will need to be decided on by Parliament and everyone gets to laugh and point at members of the the Green Party, Friends of the Earth and Transition Towns.  The worst that will happen is that we'll have funded some useful short term environmental protections in coastal towns and flood plains which will have reduced their insurance costs and protected some local industries.  The sort of thing we've been doing for years.

Of course if those folk from the Green Party, Friends of the Earth and Transition Towns are right about man made climate change, and the climate deniers in power right now do manage to wreck the current green levies funding climate change mitigation strategies, then those brown levies will have to go up over time.  And up.  And up.  Adapting to global climate change, even with the moderate changes we're likely to see in the UK, is likely to be very expensive.  Possibly more expensive than the cost of mitigating climate change in the first place.  And of course you'll also be paying for the higher priced fossil fuels themselves still, as UK plc won't have been made more energy efficient or built out its low carbon power generation sufficiently.  We may well be less competitive with some of our neighbours who will be more self-reliant on locally sourced power, so those increased costs will come at the same time as reduced trading incomes.  Oh, and there's those targets we won't have met to deal with as well.

So there's the glove slapped down to the climate change deniers in power trying to reduce green levies: put your (and everyone else's) money where your mouths are and agree to introduce legally binding climate adaptation brown levies if you remove climate mitigation green levies.  What do you, in your world view, have to lose after all?

Nuclear reactor design validation and space industries.

I was chewing the fat over nuclear reactor designs with a chum on Twitter when something struck me.  One of the big issues in producing new nuclear designs is finding somewhere to build a prototype to validate the design.  There's lots of interesting, and potentially much safer and cleaner fission reaction designs being mooted, but most of them stay as computer simulations or paper designs because its increasingly difficult to get regulatory approval for building the reactors.

This is understandable in a way: few countries want to make it easy for companies to build dodgy designs that could leak radioactivity into the environment.  This means that reactor designs need to be carefully approved usually, which is very, very time consuming and thus very, very costly.

It also plays into the hands of the incumbent reactor manufacturers. Their designs are often evolutions of older, well understood reactors and the companies know the ropes of regulatory approval.  The regulators also know the companies and people involved.  These same companies also have a vested interested in not allowing some of the GenIV designs to be rapidly developed as they make quite a bit of their income from selling fuel rods for existing fission reactor designs, which some of the newer designs do away with (most notably pebble bed reactors and molten salt reactors using liquid fuels).

So onto my wacky idea: why not do initial validation of new reactor designs in space?  There are some distinct advantages:

a) If the design fails, a leak isn't going to be an ecological disaster.  If you put a reactor on the moon or an artificial satellite outside of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) reactor leaks aren't going to get back into Earth's biosphere terribly easily.

b) Space access charges are falling.  Companies like Elon Musk's SpaceX are reducing the price of getting mass into orbit.  At the moment most of this is targeted at getting equipment and people into LEO (for example supplying the ISS) but the basic launcher technology developments are ultimately aimed at getting mass to Mars.  Having a commercial funding opportunity get part of the way there would help the commercial space launch industry as well as the nuclear industry.

c) Whilst getting the equipment into space is expensive, it might be offset against the cost of the massively constructed containment buildings that are often required on Earth but wouldn't be required for the validation reactors in space.  Who cares if you've got minimal containment on the reactor if there's no biosphere to pollute?

d) Advanced robotics mean that you might well not need to send people up with these reactors, so you don't even have to worry about worker contamination/decontamination.

e) No extra nuclear waste will be generated on Earth, which is good seeing as Governments are still flapping about what to do with the stuff we've already generated.  If anyone is worried, provide ability to fire into the Sun!

There are downsides of course (probably lots of them considering this is just recording one of my brain farts!):

a) Getting radioactive material into space is nearly as tricky from a regulatory point of view as building the reactors.  Folk don't want radioisotopes being blown up all over the sky for some reason. Radiothermal generators have been sent out on space craft though so its not insurmountable, especially if space access charges mean that you can spread your fuel load into a number of small consignments spread out over many launches (so one launch failure doesn't mean a full reactor load of fuel being exposed to the biosphere).  Fuel containment and escape options may also help, especially as we have experience of equipment that has survived rocket explosions in the past.

b) Lack of gravity may affect some reactor designs.  This would require artificial gravity to be provided (simulated by rotating the reactor to give a 1g acceleration).  Reactor designs that don't suffer from this may of course be of interest for space exploration applications themselves.

c) Validation of a reactor design in space will still then require national regulators to accept the results.  This is unproven and may be just as costly/long winded as getting the prototypes approved for Earth bound deployment.

d) Hostile environment: whilst space doesn't have a biosphere to pollute, it does have micro-meterorites, difficult thermal gradients (very cold in shadow, boiling in the Sun), solar winds, etc, etc to deal with.  Lots of engineering fun to be had!

Well, just an idea.  Worth kicking out there for comment and thoughts though!

Allotment waiting lists & community gardens

In many parts of the country there are long waiting lists for allotment plots. In some large towns and cities these waiting lists might stretch for years. People often complain that councils should "do something" about them and often mention getting groups together to demand more space for allotments. Unfortunately few councils are in the position to make new land and what property holdings they do have are now under pressure to return a decent income, especially with all the deep cuts in their budgets recently.

At the same time we have community gardens struggling to keep going due to the need for volunteers.  These shared growing spaces are often set up to provide garden beds for those with no access to their own backyards, but they can also give schools that lack their own gardens beds for the children to grow in. Community gardens should really be a place to help build community spirit & cohesion but it seems many of them struggle to recruit enough volunteers interested and/or knowledgeable in gardening to sustain their development.

So here's an idea for councils: take your allotment waiting list and point people on it to their local community garden. Folk who take up the challenge and help at the community garden get to move more rapidly up the waiting list. This has a number of benefits :

* councils are seen to be "doing something" about allotment waiting lists,

* community gardens are likely to get a steady flow of volunteer gardeners, some of whom might well stick around even after getting their own allotment plot,

* new comers to allotments & gardening get to sample what the work is like, the ups and downs of growing & pick up hints and tips before they take up their own plot. Some folk like the idea of gardening more than they like the actual work, and so this might "weed them out" before a precious allotment plot is allocated to them,

* links will be forged between the community gardens & allotment sites, which may help with things like Tool Banks, harvest festivals, In Bloom schemes, etc.

Now some people might not want to do shared gardening and just want their own private plot. That's fine - they can just stay on the council's allotment waiting list. They might be leap frogged by some more sociable, community minded folk, but they might also find some folk drop out of the list when they discover the time & effort commitment gardening imposes.

Indestructible chickweed (or what's going to be drought tolerant this summer)

Today the Spring sunshine has finally shone and we've had a bit of warmth for gardeners in much of the UK.  And about time too - its been a cold, dark Spring, following hot on the heels of a cold, dark Winter and a wet, dark Summer and Autumn in 2012.

Back in Autumn 2012 I sorted out the pots on my entrance balcony (yes, I'm a gardener with a first floor flat with no garden!), mostly to get rid of last years annuals and pop in some Spring bulbs (which are now flowering by the way, no thanks to the local cats who've used all of my pots, tubs and troughs as toileting facilities for the last five months).  I bought in one home made self-watering pot (made out of an old squash bottle) and put in on the window sill.

And then promptly forgot about it.  Until just before Xmas when I noticed the compost had a little green shoot showing.  I'd no idea what it was so I gave it a good drowning which meant it would have enough water to last until I got back home after Xmas visits and hopefully find out what it was.

When 2013 found me back in my flat I discovered that what I was growing wasn't some lovely self-sown annual flower worthy of the Higgledy Garden flower beds, but blinking chickweed.  Oh well, never mind.  I promptly ignored the pot again, intending to empty it out and reuse it in the Spring when I started to sow veggies and herbs in the flat again (yeah I know - I'm lazy and slovenly).

Well, Spring as I said is finally dragging itself into being and so I was tidying up the pots in the north facing windowsill.  And look at my little chickweed now:

Lush and green, eh?  Little flowers, trailing stems, the very picture of healthy plant life!

But wait: I've not watered that pot since Xmas.  I know its a self-watering pot, but that just means that it can last a week or two when filled up, not four months.  The compost in it is old and exhausted and bone dry! And yet little Miss Chickweed seems to be doing fine thank you very much.  Amazing hardiness.  I can only assume its nipping over the hallway to the downstairs loo in the middle of the night and having a quick drink in there.

Now I know its been wet and cold and dark since it forever (or at least feels that way) but no doubt later in the year we might well be complaining about the heat and drought (well, we can wish at least).  We'll be looking at our wilting veg plots and empty rainwater butts, wondering what edible plant can cope with such drought.  With heat.  With cold.  With full sun.  With overcast darkness. With, er, more or less anything that you can throw at it.

I give you chickweed: the future of vegetable gardening in the Climate Change world.

Vegetarians and buffets

I've just been to an event at our local town hall that included a buffet lunch.  There wasn't any option on the booking form to indicate "vegetarian" or "vegan", so I sort of assumed that the buffet would include a good smattering of well labelled veggie food at the very least.  I was wrong: there were piles of pork pies and unlabelled pastries and sandwiches.  I had to rely on the old veggie tactic of asking omnivores whether they thought that this or that might be veggie.  This resulted in a few solid little cheese tartlets and a cheese and pickle sandwich.  Good job I'm not a strict vegan or I'd have been completely stuffed.

Now I can sort of understand people self-catering for family parties who aren't used to veggies doing something like this.  However this was being laid on by professional caterers.  Surely its part of their professional skills to ensure that veggies, who after all make up a fair percentage of the UK population these days, are suitably catered for?

In fact why do folk serve non-veggie food at buffets at all?  I've never found a meat eater who can't eat anything that doesn't contain flesh.  Indeed most are quite happy to indulge in veggie foods and on occasion I've been to buffets where the veggie options have run out far more rapidly than the number of veggies at the event would indicate.  When you think about it just providing a range of veggie, or better yet vegan, finger food would cover all bases and leave everyone happy.  I've seen some absolutely fabulous vegan food served as buffets, pop-up kitchens or as street food as events.  I can't believe everyone tucking into those was a committed vegan, yet they didn't seem to be raising any complaints.

So come on event organisers and professional caterers: get your acts together and make sure there's well labelled food that everyone can eat.  If nothing else you'll be less likely to get a "rubbish buffet" response on the feedback form from the veggies you've invited.

Decentralised energy generation - a lesson for nuclear?

In the UK, as in many other countries, there's been rapid growth over the last five or so years in the amount of electrical power generated by small "micro-generation" installations.  Some of these, such as domestic solar PV set ups, are small and cheap enough to be paid for by individuals.  Other usually somewhat larger schemes (up to a couple of megawatts) are owned by community groups of one form or another.  Most of these micro-generation projects have been based on renewable "alternative" power sources such as solar, wind or hydro.  Millions of pounds are being invested in micro-generation systems - people see small, localised energy generation as a way of gaining some measure of control and involvement over the energy they use.

Whilst I think decentralised power is a great idea, and I'm fully behind getting as many renewables on the grid as possible, we're still going to need something with more energy density that can provide energy when the sun doth not shine, nor the wind bloweth.  Grid level storage is part of the solution for this issue, as is grid interconnections between countries.   Of course baseload generation has traditionally been the domain of the large scale coal, gas and to some extent nuclear power stations.

Now coal is a no-no for future power stations - "clean coal" seems to be a pipedream with carbon capture and storage still very much in the experimental stage and the economics looking decidedly shaky.  That's without considering the "carbon cost" of getting the coal out of the ground and thousands of tons of it shipped around the planet between the mines and the power stations.  Of course the UK doesn't produce much coal any more, so those "coal miles" are now seriously long journeys across the world.

George Osbourne and chums seem intent on making a second "dash for gas", either by getting the UK hooked on volatile foreign imports or kickstarting an on shore gas boom based on hydraulic fracking.  Gas has a far lower carbon footprint than coal which is good, but, as the Americans seem to be rapidly discovering, fracking can be very environmentally damaging and short well productivity lifespans can result in the investment regime look more like a Ponzi scheme.   We're probably going to have gas in the UK Grid mix for many decades to come, but its probably worth seeing if we can minimise it to handling rapid on/off load following applications.

Nuclear was seen by many, including surprisingly quite a few influential environmental champions, as the great white hope for large scale, low carbon energy.  UK governments of several hues have pinned their hopes on it as well, but as we've seen over the last few years the plans have been somewhat derailed with many reactor vendors pulling out of schemes.  Only EDF still seem to be in the race, and they'll probably only stay the course if they get underwriting guarantees from the Government and/or some buy in from the Chinese.

Part of the reason why nuclear has stumbled is the vast costs attached to the current Generation III+ designs.  Part of this is a result of the regulatory and insurance landscapes surrounding nuclear power, but part of it is that these nuclear power stations will be huge, centralised power generators, each delivering somewhere between a few hundred megawatts and a gigawatt into the National Grid.  Getting this sort of investment is tricky, especially in a recessionary period.

Its also a liability for the Grid.  The anti-wind crowd constantly moan about what might happen to the Grid if the wind doesn't blow and the turbines suddenly stop, but the turbines are geographically spread around the UK and weather forecasting can predicted wind speeds in different areas fairly accurately out to a day or so.  If a turbine fails unexpectedly the Grid might lose a couple of megawatts - a relatively easy loss to deal with.  On the other hand if a gigawatt centralised nuclear station suddenly goes offline, the Grid management have their work cut out.  Decentralised generation can add resilience to the Grid.

Now I reckon there's another way forward for nuclear power: instead of looking at huge, monolithic GenIII+ designs that still need billions of pounds spent for "development" and construction, we should be turning to some of the innovative, smaller GenIV designs.  There's plenty of these designs floating around, and not all of them are just in the heads of the Internet's nuke geeks.  Indeed a number seem to have the backing of large companies (such as Toshiba's 4S) or Government's (for example China's development of thorium reactors).

Lets imagine for a moment that one of these GenIV designs gets produced in a package that generates a few tens of megawatts and can be mass produced (maybe not in huge numbers, but with a production line at least capable of making a few hundred reactors).  This sort of power output puts it in between the community owned renewables and the large scale utility power stations.  If the vendors can get the price point down to a £20-50million per reactor then that puts them in the range of a large community energy project (Westmill solar PV farm for example managed to raise several million pounds in a community share issue in 2012 - I know because I've got some of those shares!).  It certainly makes the attractive for commercial generators as well - one fracking company recently raised over £20million in a share listing just on the hint that there may be some potential future profits in fracked gas.

Sealed reactors limit proliferation and radioactive contamination vectors, and many of the GenIV designs are designed from the ground up as inherently walk away safe.  Designs that burn up an appreciable fraction of their fuel load also limit nuclear waste issues (and the waste we've already got could be viewed as fuel in some design options, but that's another topic).

Some folk are opposed to nuclear reactors of any design, so this idea isn't likely to be popular with them.  However having the option of a community sized reactor with a 5-10 year long lifespan between refuelling would give community energy schemes another avenue.  If nothing else you could then offer the anti-wind community the option of the neighbourhood underground nuke station...