Donald Noble’s Site

I watched the fourth episode of the current series of Horizon last night on iPlayer — Is Seeing Believing? — the first one of this seris I have seen.

Horizon does seem to have improved back to it’s previous high standard, and was not dumbed down for TV as it was a couple of seasons ago. However, I still think the old credits were better, with the ————HorizOn———— graphic.

That aside, the programme was a fascinating look into what we know about our senses, and how this knowledge has improved in the past 10 years or so. I was aware of some of the content of the programme, but much of it was new and incredibly interesting:

Such as the fact that we use our sense of hearing to taste if crisps are fresh! If we hear a high frequency sound, we “taste” that they are crunchy.

There was also some incredible footage of a blind person cycling a bike, using echolocation to navigate around a park, in a similar manner to bats.

I will definitely be downloading the rest of the series as it becomes available, something to watch now the dark winter nights are here. (another being updating my blog…)

For those of you that may be interested in such things, this post goes into some of the software powering the site, and the styling of the content. If that doesn’t interest you, feel free to skip onto something else…

Textpattern

The content management system I have been using for the past few months since the refresh to power the site is Textpattern.

Textpattern is an elegant content management system that is free, open source software. It has a powerful, sophisticated engine that can be infinitely tuned to suit whatever type of web site you can imagine.

I hope to make more use of this, to customise further the display of each section, e.g. I have implemented a basic a categorised list of recipes on the main page of that section.

Textile

One of the benefits of Textpattern, is that it has support for Textile) built in. This allows for simple markup of the content, without having to resort to writing raw XHTML in your posts.

For example to get emphasised text _underscores_ are used, or * asterisks at the start of the line to give bulleted lists. See the Textile page for a full list and demo.

I know WordPress has a toolbar which allows you to insert the relevant markup, but I find it easier to keep typing, plus I can compose fully marked up posts on my phone, and the resulting markup from WYSIWHG web forms like Wordpress uses can be cluttered.

Site Styles

Those of you browsing in a modern standards compliant browser (Safari 4, Firefox 3, Chrome, or Opera 10 to an extent) will have effects like fancy gothic lettering, drop shadows, and semi-transparent layers of white and black to highlight the content. Some of these will work in Internet Explorer, but it does not fully support everything¹.

Alpha Transparency

It is remarkably easy to specify semi-transparent effects with CSS3 rgba() colours. Wherever you specify the colour, replace the normal color:#00FF00 hexadecimal codes with color:rgba(0,255,0,0.5) and specify an amount of transparency as the fourth parameter (50% in this case). Unfortunately, IE doesn’t support this as yet¹. This should also make changing the colour scheme much easier, as all the highlight tones change with the background image, instead of having to manually calculate complimentary colours.

Web-fonts & text-stroke

To spice up the headings, I’m using CSS @font-face to import a free blackletter style font. This can then be used, as you would any other font.

For the title, I have also used the text-stroke property (only implemented in Safari/Webkit). This allows for different outline and fill colours, as shown in the enlarged screenshot of the text. The relevant parts of the CSS are:

hgroup h1 {
 font: 3em IncisedBlackWideNormal, cursive;
 text-shadow:2px 3px 3px #420;
 -webkit-text-fill-color: #630;
 -webkit-text-stroke: 1px black;
 }

Drop-caps

The drop capitals at the start of each article are automatically applied using the CSS-selector .body > p:first-child:first-letter {} which matches the first letter, of the first paragraph (p:first child) where this is directly contained within an element with class .body (which I use to denote the main text of each article). The CSS used for the formatting is a little more complex, and I’ll not explain it in detail as it has been done ad infinitum elsewhere.

.body > p:first-child:first-letter {
 float:left;
 display:block;
 font: 2.2em IncisedBlackWideNormal;
 margin: 0 2pt 0 -2pt;
 padding: 0;
 line-height:0.8; }

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¹ I have reverted to using a semi-transparent image to provide a similar (but less elegant) effect for IE, as the site looked very plain otherwise.

I’ve been meaning to put together a list of podcasts I regularly listen to/watch for a while now, so in alphabetical order…

Electronic Explorations

To quote from the website, electronicexplorations.org/

this podcast is a mix of “dubstep, minimal electronica, techno and advanced soundscapes. … If you like your music experimental, uncompromising, hand crafted and eerie, mathematical and heavy on the bass then look no further than Electronic Explorations.

It contains an excellent range of music, most of it right up my street — and I’m willing to challenge my taste in music with the rest. Rob manages to select an amazing range of producers to supply mixes for the show, whether that be to promote their label, new release, or just for the love of music. He also manages to provide enough information on what is playing, without sounding like an over-eagre breakfast-show DJ on local radio, often mixing together 2, 3 or more tracks in a group.

The Pod Delusion

a podcast about interesting things. From scepticism to lefty liberal things, it’s commentary from a secular, rationalist, ‘Guardianista’, sort of perspective. A bit like From Our Own Correspondent but with more jokes.

A significant proportion of this podcast is not topics I would necessarily look out for in the media. Some are quite lighthearted, many are of massive importance to the future of this country (like the Libel Reform Petition), but few are boring. Plus it is a brilliant name. More details at the Pod Delusion website

Carpool

Robert Llewellen (Red Dwarf, Scrapheap Challenge, …) produces a weekly video podcast, where he offers someone a lift in his Prius, and interviews them en-route. I think the main advantage of this format, is that the interviews are so much less formal. You get to see what the people he is interviewing are really like.

More at llewtube.com (not sure if google are happy with this name)

Guardian Science Weekly

While I read most of what is discussed on this podcast in some other source, it offers some interesting discussion on the issues. Plus, as a podcast, it can be listened to whilst walking. Which is difficult to do with a broadsheet newspaper.

Over the past couple of weekends, I have climbed these three Grahams on the rough plateau to the west of Loch Ness and north of Glen Moriston. They inhabit a barren landscape, strewn with lochans, bog and peat hags, with some rough rocky tops poking through.

On Easter sunday, I headed up Glen Affric, past Tomich and Plodda Falls, and parked at Cougie Farm. I started the walk in the warm sunshine, after realising I would not be needing my heavy winter fleece, by following a forestry track west for about 600m. The ascent started when I turned south onto an Argocat track, following a steep path beside a burn to Bealach Fèith na Gamhna. Once onto ridge, an easy walk SW to a trig point, before crossing a rocky/peaty plateau to the true summit about 300m to the south. The air felt properly warm for the first time on the hills this year, and it was nice to be able to sit about and take in the view while eating lunch.

The descent was by a slightly more direct route cutting through a felled forestry plantation (which was not such a quick route as it looked due to the presence of hidden branches forming formidable trip hazards!). After returning to the farm, I decided to also climb the small hill to the west, Meall Dubh, hoping for even better views of the snow capped Glen Affric Munros. Dense forestry plantation seemed to block the ascent, so I ended up walking along the track for about 2km to a gap, where there was a very steep ascent to summit. While closer to Glen Affric, it is also a lower hill, so while the views were stunning, they weren’t any better. Again, I decided to chance a more direct route of descent, bashing through the forestry plantation, which was quite hard work.

The following weekend, Malcolm and I went up the two hills to the east. We parked just west of Invermoriston, at Blàraidh, and cycled up the rather steep track to Loch Liath, where we left the bikes. On foot, we followed the rough ridge west to the top of Carn Mhic an Toisich over quite rough ground with no sign of a path, then returned by the same route.

Back on the bikes, we cycled through a ford swollen with meltwater, and further up the track to Loch ma Stac. Walking east then northeast over easier terrain, we contoured round a small top then ascended a rocky ridge to the summit of Meall a’Chrathaich. Moments after we reached the summit, a (very light) flurry of snow started falling. Quite a change from the previous week! We hastily returned to bikes, and went down the track, back to car rather faster than we came up.

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Total time taken: 4 and 4½ hours; Distance: 12km and 27km (16km by bike); Height Climbed 690m and 880m; Photos Taken: 83 and 76.

Photos on Flickr and the second set

I was going to write a piece about the recent anouncement that the USA and Russia are committing to reduce the number of nuclear warheads they have in service, and that we in the UK should be doing likewise. But George Monbiot has written something much better than I could, in his article War with the Ghosts which I urge you to read of you have not already done so.

The non-proliferation treaty, to which the UK has signed up to, commits the nuclear powers “to pursue negotiations in good faith on … nuclear disarmament”. So why the hell are we as a country still planning to spend tens of billions of pounds on replacing the Tridant “nuclear deterrant”. This is especially ludicrous — as if it’s not already stupid enough — when we are in the depths of a recesion, when we can least afford it. The Lib Dems are at least saying they would consider other options to like-for-like replacement of Trident — but does this go far enough?

We need to keep telling the politicians — who, after all, are in government to represent us — that there are better things to spend taxpayers’ money on. Even a duck house with a moat would be a better use of the money (in that it is 10 orders of magnitude less).

You could also sign up to the Global Zero: Together for Zero petition.