Fortnightly Mailing

Stretchered off: Hardangervidda to Rjukan

What can go wrong on a ski-trip?

Over Easter this year – with my friends B and A – I did a 9 day hut-to-hut ski-tour running roughly North to South across Hardangervidda, the huge high wild roadless plateau of central Norway, that is bounded to the North by the Hardanger glacier, and to the North and West by the innermost lobes of Hardangerfjord. (At one point the glacier and the sea are less than 10 km apart.)

I did a similar trip in completely different weather and snow conditions in 2008 with B and daughter M (from Haugestøl go Haukeliseter).  This year we started at Hallingskeid on the Oslo to Bergen railway a little East of Finse and a bit before the trains begin their steep decent towards Bergen. For me the trip finished about 2 km short of the road at Haukeliseter after nearly 200 km. (For aficionados our route was Hallingskeid – Rembesdalseter – Kjeldebu – Dyranut – Hadlaskard – Torehytten – Tyssevasbu – Litlos – Hellevasbu – Haukeliseter.)

This Easter, central Norway was blessed with high pressure, leading to sunny, cloudless, cold and largely windless conditions. Lack of snow and previous strong winds meant that there was plenty of lumpy and grooved sastrugi to contend with, and a lot of hard and quite smooth unforgiving and sometimes shiny icy surfaces. And it was exceptionally cold, with -30C on some nights and daytime temperatures of between -23 and -5C.

In the continuation post below are a few pictures from the wonderful trip. But the purpose of this long post is to record what happened when things went wrong. I’m doing this partly to help others better to understand the anatomy of an accident, and partly to get what happened out of my system. What follows is a slightly edited version of something I wrote in Oslo on 1 April on the way home.

Drifting from "having a market economy to becoming a market society" - Michael Sandel

In this 50-minute session from the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival, Michael J. Sandel gets his audience (and viewers like me and you) thinking about the adverse civic and moral consequences of market mechanisms being introduced into so many areas of public and working life. At the same time he exemplifies a (very difficult to carry off) approach to large group learning.

Here is a rough transcription of Sandel's conclusion, which probably owes its impact to what came before it in the talk:

I think it is no accident that two things have been happening over the past 30 years. One is that what we've discussed today: the tendency to rely more and more on market mechanisms without any public debate. And something else that's been happening which is the hollowing out of public discourse in general. What passes for political discourse these days consists mainly of shouting matches on talk radio and cable TV, and ideological food fights in congress. People are frustrated by this. I think one of the reasons for this is our reluctance to engage in serious public debate about big and controversial moral questions.

But the result of that reluctance is that we have a public discourse that is either managerial and technocratic, which inspires no-one, or, when passion enters, we have shouting matches. People want a better kind of politics.

People want to elevate the terms of our public discourse. People want to address big things in public. So I think that the hollowing out of our public discourse, and the market triumphalist faith that has gone unexamined even after the financial crisis have a common solution. It's not an easy solution. But it's a new kind of politics of the common good that admits, that welcomes into public debate moral engagement on big tough controversial questions, not because we will all agree: we won't; but because it may teach us to listen and learn a little bit better, and it will also lift our sights from the rancour that inflicts our politics, to what I think is a more strenuous kind of citizenship; but also a more satisfying democratic pulic life.

Stolpersteine - joining up the personal and the professional in a 20 minute talk about learning technology

Sculptor Gunter Demnig and his co-worker embedding three Stolpersteine (stumbling blocks) into the cobbles outside 52 Oderstrasse, in Neukölln, Berlin, on 29 November 2012.

Small addition to final paragraph made on 10 May 2013

Today I gave a talk at a conference in Berlin called Online Educa, in which I tried to meld the personal and the professional into one piece. So far as I could tell from the audience reaction this worked: but partially. (Link to the presentation I used [45 page 3 MB PDF, includes the script for the talk]; link to a somewhat "heavy breathing" video recording of the talk on YouTube; link to other videos of talks at the conference on the Online Educa web site).

Below is a series of pictures I took yesterday (on 29 November) of sculptor Gunter Demnig and his co-worker embedding three Stolpersteine (stumbling blocks) into the cobbles outside 52 Oderstrasse, in Neukölln, Berlin. The Stolpersteine commemorate Selma Lewin, Martha Meth and Max Meth, and the pictures show descendents of the family at the informal ceremony that was held, and childred from a local school who had become involved in  researching Selma, Martha and Max.  Eight further batches of Stolpersteine - 18 in total - were embedded by Demnig on the same day in Neukölln. Between Tuesday and Friday of this week a total of  115 Stolpersteine were laid outside 36 houses all over Berlin. [I am in the process of arranging Stolpersteine to be laid outside the block where my grandparents and great grandmother last lived in Berlin, before they were taken to Terezin in Autumn 1942.] You may also be interested in this May 2013 piece by Andreas Kluth, the Economist's Berlin Bureau Chief.

Brewster Kahle and the love of books - physical and digital

Engaging six minute piece in which Alan Yentob talks to Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle about the archive, and its mission to archive books as objects as well as to digitise them systematically. [No cloud based infrastructure yet for the the archive, by the look of things.]

See also this 2007 TED talk by Khale.

It is a matter of regret....

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher with Press Secretary Bernard Ingham, second right, and others at Hillsborough on 16 April 1989, the day after the disaster [Source: Page 185 of the Report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel]

With the publication of the coruscating Report of the Hillsborough Independent Panel [PDF], I am rereading my copies of Lord Justice Taylor's August 1989 Interim Report [PDF] and January 1990 Final Report into the 15 April 1989 Hillsborough Stadium Disaster (Cm 759 and Cm 962).

I am also looking again at my copies of a few papers about the disaster, including letters to the press by the then Labour MP for Hillsborough Martin Flannery, and materials from  Sheffield Trades Union Council, including the Trades Council's 3 October 1989 media release "calling for Police Officers, irrespective of rank, found to have been responsible in any way for the disaster, to be dismissed",  and the Trades Council's submissions to the Taylor Inquiry of May and October 1989, in which I had a hand at the time.

Raising money for Barnsley Hospice whilst trying to win a world championship

Source

On 18 August I will ride in a team of veterans in the Brompton World Championships, a surprisingly intense and serious event for users of Brompton folding bikes, involving 750 competitors, including a few world-renowned riders, run on a hilly, narrow, winding course at Blenheim in Oxfordshire.

In 2010 mine was the fastest team of veterans.

Last year we were pipped to second by a cumulative total of 38 seconds, spread across three riders.

You can motivate us to "regain the crown" by sponsoring us in aid of Barnsley Hospice, in whose colours we will ride.

What I plan doing when I stand down from my role in ALT / People have started asking

I left my job of the last 9+ years on 8 May.

A friend emailed me with "what are your plans?".

This is most of my answer:

The short answer is that I'm not much of a planner. 

I only ever worked for ALT half-time and I will continue to do some independent work. My aim is to put my knowhow to good and productive use.

I will get back into writing Fortnightly Mailing more consistently. Tweet less, write more.

I fantasise about spending more time:

• reading the books that are stacked up on the floor of my office;
• practising the piano for the lessons I've been having for the last four or so years;
• fell-running.

A close friend has just bought two fields a shortish distance away (see below) that she intends to make back into a traditional hay meadow. I will help her with that.

I already spend quite a bit of time being an FE college Governor and earlier this year I was appointed for a second four year term.

I used to be quite good at advising and representing people on employment issues. If Citizens' Advice Bureaux will have me I may put myself forward as a volunteer.

I am intending to do some Udacity courses, compensating for the fact of having been diverted early on from a childhood interest.

I am standing for election - in a crowded field - to the Board of the Open Rights Group.

[Small edits 17 May 2012.]

Tyin to Finse, Easter 2012

Moon rising over Bjordalsbu hut (1580m)  in Skarvheimen, 6 April 2012

Over Easter I spent 10 days skiing with a friend, in a 200km upside down J shaped route, from Lake Tyin South of Jotunheimen, via Tomashelleren and Yksendalsbu to Fondsbu, and then more-or-less due South to Finse, the high point on the railway line between Bergen and Oslo.

Norway had had about its warmest ever March, with snow much reduced below 1000m. Luckily by the time we set out cold conditions had returned, with temperatures down to -20^oC on some nights (hence the semi-obsession with stoves in the pictures below).

From the second day, fresh snow had begun to cover the nasty  "boiler plate" left by the thaw; and from day three, with the North West wind largely gone, conditions gradually improved.

A saucer of beans

Runner beans straight from the pod earlier today.

The human brain while texting, tweeting, phoning, driving

As a cyclist I've developed a sixth sense about which vehicles will, when they get close, be driven by a phone user; along with a riskily combative approach to such drivers if I can engage with them....

The Economist's Andreas Kluth is rightly a bit obsessed with the same issue, and writes about it here.

Excerpt (which could equally well apply to people texting/tweeting etc whilst allegedly concentrating on the things around them):

The human brain cannot process communication (oral or written) with a person who is not physically present without drastically reallocating attention and thus compromising driving safety. This is a biological fact. All those who claim that they can call/text and drive are the modern equivalents of the people you might (if you’re older) recall bragging that “I can hold my liquor” before that started sounding ridiculous.

Note. The are links to references in the second comment to this post below.