Opening up Open Source (by alaric)

One of the awesome things about free/open source software (FOSS) is that, as you have access to the source code, you have exactly as much power as the original authors of the software to modify and extend it.

When you are upset about something in closed-source software, or one hosted on the owner's servers on the Internet as a web app or API, all you can do is beg and plead with them, and threaten to take your future business elsewhere; they control the source code, so they have ultimate power. With FOSS software, in theory, the original authors have no special powers.

However, it often doesn't quite work out like that in practice.

Most FOSS software comes onto people's computers as a precompiled binary; they download it and run it. This is convenient and efficient. But if they then want to use their theoretical right to get in there and modify it, they need to do the following things:

1. Learn the programming language(s) it's written in, and the libraries/frameworks/APIs it builds on top of. (This is particularly tricky if they have no previous programming experience).
2. Find and download the sources (which shouldn't be too hard, but can still be tricky).
3. Set up a build environment that can compile the thing. This may involve installing compilers, and development versions of libraries in order to get the header files, and so on.
4. Actually make it compile. A lot of the time, a source package as shipped by the authors won't compile perfectly outright, as you need to apply patches written by the people who maintain the package for your platform, as each platform has their own conventions as to where things are placed in the filesystem, and their interaction with less-standardised bits of infrastructure such as service management frameworks, management of network interfaces, low-level hardware access, and so on.
5. Learn the workings of the codebase. For a large project, this can be VERY daunting, even to a seasoned programmer.
6. Actually design, implement, and debug the change. If the codebase is poorly architected, this can be made unnecessarily difficult, and require refactoring of existing code elsewhere within the codebase.
7. Install the software once it's building. As it's been custom-built, it may not interact nicely with your platform's package manager, so you may end up running it out of /usr/local/bin or ~/bin or similar, and have trouble making managed packages that depend on the one you're tinkering with correctly linking to it, interaction with system configuration tools, and so on.

I think this is harder than it needs to be. It puts a lower bound on the effort required to make even a trivial change that, in many cases, means it's not worth making it; we're as beholden to the whims of the developers of the package as we would be to a closed-source software company, and the supposed benefits of open source are denied to you.

We can break down the barriers into a number of categories, and look at what can be done to solve each.

Learning the programming environment

Whether you're a seasoned programmer or not, any given piece of software you didn't write will involve a set of languages, tools, libraries, and other things, that you may not be familiar with, and these will need to be learnt.

What might help is better standards for automatically-generated API documentation, so you can find the documentation of API functions as they are used in the software you're learning how to edit by just pressing a button in your editor.

But if it became easier, commonplace, and expected for people to dig around in other people's source code, for curiosity or to make their own changes, developers of infrastructure components would feel more compelled to document their interfaces in ways that casual programmers can quickly pick them up, and to make their interfaces simpler and easier to learn, because the expected audience would be less dominated by seasoned programmers.

And, conversely, if more people were casually getting involved in simple programming tasks in order to improve the software they use (if it became easier to do so), then the general programming ability of the population would also rise, giving more people the grounding in basic conventions and concepts required to understand programming tools...

Migrating from a normal installation of the software to a hackable one

This is perhaps the biggest hurdle, and yet, the most amenable to being overcome with better technology. It covers the whole spectrum from finding and downloading the source code, setting up a build environment, getting it building on your platform, and getting it installed as a first-class citizen in the eyes of your package manager.

I can think of two technical fixes to this problem, and the best bit is, they're both things that already exist out there rather than my usual kinds of crazy new reinvent-the-wheel thinking!

Firstly, package managers like Nix make it easy to establish build environments on your own hardware, as the build environment of any package can be requested, and automatically set up for you. Also, they are built around installing software from sources in the first place, and offer downloading pre-built binaries as an optimisation. It's quite easy to adapt a nix expression that builds a software package from downloaded sources to one that builds from a source tarball you've made yourself, and install it into an isolate "profile" in such a way that it's easily kept isolated from other software you have running and might not want to risk being broken by your experimental changes yet, and to roll the change back if it doesn't work out.

I suspect that many traditional package managers are written with users in mind, and not developers, which sounds laudable; but in practice it forces the distinction between user and developer, not allowing the former to easily migrate into the latter. Nix feels written for developers, of course acknowledging that developers are also users and still want to be able to install off-the-shelf prebuilt binaries easily. The inbuilt package manager for Chicken Scheme is likewise developer-friendly, letting you directly build from arbitrary checked-out source trees into a properly installed package; my development process for most Chicken software is to run chicken-install in my in-progress sources as the first port of call to compile and run it, rather than the usual idiom in most languages of compiling and running from the source checkout then "installing" the binaries as an optional, later, step. And yet a "mere" end-user of my software can type chicken-install ugarit, and Chicken will download the latest public Ugarit release from the Internet and install it for them. If they want to join me in hacking Ugarit, they can check out the latest sources from my web site and get stuck in pretty quickly.

Secondly, the move away from compiling software ahead-of-time into distributable binaries, towards on-demand compilation of source code at run time (with caching of compiled forms, of course), means that the normal installation of some software is the source code, there is no need for an external "build environment" to convert your changes into a runnable package, and changes to the source code can be immediately used without going through any kind of build/install phase. Because this makes tinkering with the software so much easier, it can make it become a routine part of using the software, rather than something special done only by special people. The typical Emacs user will have overridden various internal functions of Emacs from within their personal configuration; although many configurations can be done without doing so, customisation through function overriding is so accessible that people routinely customise their Emacs installations in ways that the original developers didn't think (or didn't have time/energy) to add as a configurable option. I wish all open-source projects were written in such an open manner, but it will require a lot of migration away from the batch-compilation model of C, C++, and Java.

Poorly-architected existing code

This is a thorny issue; even if you can easily get into the code of your application and make the changes you want, and you understand all the tools it's built with, it can still be hard to make the changes you want because of one of a number of kinds of inherent "fragility" in the way the software is constructed.

Usually, this boils down to some variant on the idea of some information being repeated all over the code, rather than kept in one place. If your code relies on communicating between its components by using a special file, for instance, and every place where this file is read or written contains its own code to read and write this file directly, then changes such as storing the file in a different place, or adding some extra information to it, or replacing it with access to a database or something, will be difficult. You'll need to find all the places where the file is used, and individually re-write them to reflect your changes. This is laborious, and you might miss some, leading to bugs when those bits of code are run but don't reflect the changes.

However, if the mechanism of accessing this shared state (reading and writing the file) was isolated into one place in the software, with an interface that is used wherever required and reflects only the essentials of the access to the shared state, then that mechanism can easily be changed to another, as long as it still preserves those essentials, relatively painlessly and safely.

Software developers, before they even write a line of code, be thinking about how their software might be changed in future, and make sure that they split it into modules with clean interfaces, to make that easier. As side effects, it also makes their code easier to test and debug, as the interfaces serve to define and clarify the responsibilities and expectations of each module, which makes it easy to write comprehensive tests for the modules.

If this seems like hard work, then you're doing it wrong. We've all heard of code (usually in Java, for some reason) that seems to have taken the Design Patterns book as a checklist of things to do, and features pages and pages of AbstractFactoryWrappers that just indirect everything; the actual code that does the task at hand seems to be scattered thinly amongst all this framework. That's not what I mean by designing your software to be extensible. I just mean splitting it into bits with an explicit interface between each, and makings those interfaces reveal as little as possible about the workings behind them, and putting duplicated code into modules behind interfaces rather than writing the same logic more than once, rather than making it into one big ball of inter-related mud. If you're not saving time by writing software like this in the first place, or if it seems like a burden, then you need to re-think how you write code.

I think programming languages can do a lot to help us write cleaner code, too. I find that when I'm writing C and C++, it's often hard to cleanly pull bits of functionality out into other functions due to the manual memory management which complicates interfaces, and the lack of lexically-scoped first-class functions. Code written in Lispy languages tends to be a lot more easy to refactor as it grows, leading to cleaner interfaces (on average), and the automatic memory management tends to make the interfaces simpler as well.

Also, a culture of open extensibility in software means that extensibility of your code is high in the programmer's mind at all times. Developers of Emacs packages seem to expect bits of their software to be overridden, and write it accordingly.

Conclusion

I think that making programming more accessible has very many good consequences. It gives people more power to get more out of their computers. It gives people more reason to trust computers (and as we move to a more online society, people are forced to place their trust in computers in order to take part; but being forced to place your trust in something you don't trust is a harrowing experience), as they can peer inside the software to see how it works, and fix it if it doesn't. It also means that everyday users of computers have an easy, and natural, transition into learning programming, which is a very rewarding pastime; and more people contributing to open-source projects means we all get to have a better quality of life.

So, open-source software developers, I implore you to consider these points. Try to make your software open and welcoming to newcomers!

The ups and downs of Bitcoin (by alaric)

The value of bitcoin periodically starts to rise very rapidly, then after a while, crashes and re-stabilises. Whenever a crash happens, I see a spate of anti-Bitcoin blog posts and opinion pieces, such as this by Charles Stross. Now, I think there's plenty of things wrong with Bitcoin, and plenty of worries about what its effects in the uncertain future might be; but these anti-Bitcoin pieces tend to contain a lot of misconceptions and fallacies, so I feel compelled to try and refute some of them I've been seeing.

Bitcoin's price is volatile, so it will never be useful as a currency.

It sure is volatile! There are periodic surges and crashes, superimposed on top of a generally exponential growth in value. Take a look at its price history, on a logarithmic scale, with the MtGox exchange volume in dollars.

But this volatility is all due to rapid adoption, and that won't last forever.

The current rapid deflation is not the inherent deflation of BTC (it's in its inflationary phase, anyway, with lots of new BTC being mined every day), but the rapid adoption of the new currency causing more money to flow into it. The fact that this flow is driven of public awareness of BTC is why it's so closely linked to news, with wild swings following any significant news story about Bitcoin. And the small scale of existing BTC usage compared to the size of the new influxes (and the corresponding panics!) is why the swings are so large. Once BTC has achieved the market penetration it will have in the long run, then we'll see a lot more stability.

At the moment, the growth in interest in Bitcoin is causing the value of bitcoin to rise faster than the production of new bitcoin is pushing the value back down. At some point, Bitcoin will achieve it's "saturation point", with the proportion of the world money supply in Bitcoin settling to its final level. As the rate of money flooding into Bitcoin drops, so will its rise in value drop, until eventually the inflation caused by new Bitcoins being mined will dominate and the value might even start to sink a little; unless a third factor - the rise in value of Bitcoins due to the growth of the economy it represents a stable fraction of - outweighs that (which is hard to predict). Eventually, the generation of new bitcoins will have effectively ceased, at which point the value of bitcoin will grow at about the rate of growth of the economy - a few percent each year.

Easier liquidity with existing currencies will improve the stability, presumably, as part of the volatility comes from the difficulty in exchanging Bitcoin with other currencies, making it easy for a large transaction to deplete or glut the market for Bitcoin on any given exchange. Although volatility is often cited as a reason to firewall BTC from the conventional economy, allowing it to integrate with the conventional economy will be a big step towards removing that volatility...

If Bitcoin is used like a currency (rather than a speculative investment vehicle), it will start to behave like one.

A deflationary currency is terrible as people will never want to invest in anything; it'll be more profitable to just keep savings

Ah, but as I argue above, unless I'm mistaken, in the long run, the price appreciation of Bitcoin will just be a few percent a year; the growth of the underlying economy. So it'll be about the same as an "index-linked" investment, and won't be a "market beating" investment at all. This will mean that poorly-performing investments, which grow at below the market rate, aren't very attractive; but they currently aren't, anyway.

However, will I stop putting my money into banks because it'll grow just fine when stored in my own Bitcoin wallet? So will banks have no money to lend, and be unable to offer loans to students, and startup companies, and mortgages to house buyers?

Well, even assuming that we stick with our current debt-driven economic model (and there's plenty of voices arguing for a new model to be invented, after the banking crises of the past years), a bank offering 0.1% interest will still be an attractive place for me to put my bitcoins, compared to getting 0% interest keeping them in my own wallet; the fact that my bitcoin will also be increasing in value due to deflation, regardless of where I keep it, does not influence that. Banks will have to compete with Bitcoin's ability to be transferred cheaply and easily, versus their annoying and expensive mechanisms to transfer money around, but perhaps they'll just drop SEPA and SWIFT and Faster Payments and Direct Debit and friends in favour of just offering Bitcoin transfers to and from their Bitcoin-demoninated accounts.

Sure, I wouldn't take out a mortgage denominated in bitcoins right now, with the value of a bitcoin soaring exponentially; I might buy a house for a hundred bitcoins, then after a decade, be paying a hundred-bitcoin mortgage for a house that's now worth one tenth of a bitcoin. That would be stupid. But I'd love to take out a mortgage denominated in pounds Sterling that I get to pay in bitcoins at the rate of exchange in effect at each payment; and if Bitcoin adoption levels off before bitcoin mining levels off so it has an actually inflationary phase, I'd very gladly take out a mortgage denominated in it then! But even in the very long run, when the value of a bitcoin is stably and predictably appreciating with the growth of the economy that each bitcoin represents a fraction of at a few percent a year, I'd be happy to take out a mortgage in it; I'd just expect the interest rate I paid to be adjusted to take the rate of appreciation into effect, so that the bank still makes the same effective profit out of me (and I pay the same effective premium for the service of borrowing the money), once deflation is taken into account. Long term loans and investments are calculated in terms of underlying value, and the change in the predicted mapping from that value to a number of currency units is already adjusted to take inflation into account. Basing that calculation on deflation instead won't be the end of the world.

Bitcoin isn't regulated

This is a complex point to refute, because people often don't know what they mean by it in the first place. I hear a lot of "Bitcoin isn't regulated, so you can buy child porn with it". This is confusing two unrelated concepts.

The idea is that existing currencies, such as the dollar, are "regulated". It's sort of implied that this means it's illegal to use it to buy criminal stuff, but that's due to regulations about criminal transactions, and nothing to do with regulations about the currency itself (it's just as illegal to buy drugs with bitcoins as with dollars, and we'll talk about that in the next point).

The regulation conventional currencies actually have is that there's a central bank that can control the supply, which allows them to control the rate of inflation or deflation (and, generally, they choose to inflate it). As they create the currency from scratch, they also get to choose how to introduce it into the economy - traditionally, they use it to buy government bonds, in effect giving it to the government to spend on stuff, but they could just as easily print it onto paper bills and coins and hand it out at random in the streets, although that might cause a riot.

And whether the ability of central banks to control the rate of inflation is a good thing or not is... still hotly debated. There's a grand tradition of economic thought centred around something called the Keynesian model, which is the theory behind the operation of this kind of inflationary economy, but it's not the only model, and there's no solid theoretical argument that it's the best model. Until now, the alternative models have been rather hard to test. If Bitcoin thrives as a deflationary currency, we'll get to test them. But if people tell you that Bitcoin is a disaster for the economy because it's not a good idea in a Keynesian model, that just means they don't believe a non-Keynesian model can be valid. See if you can find out why.

Another interesting point to consider is that, if the people who fear Bitcoin will destroy their Keynesian economies and replace them with anarchy and misery are true, then surely that means that there's something wrong with their Keynesian economies. If the introduction of something like Bitcoin - which will, presumably, inevitably be discovered at some point - destroys their economy, then it's inherently unstable, like a lump of explosive, just waiting for the correct stimulus to cause it to all come falling apart. That, alone, is an argument that this kind of economy is unsafe and we need to find a better one.

Bitcoin will allow money laundering and assasinations, will make tax evasion easier, and will cause the destruction of the welfare state

Well, BTC isn't all that anonymous; http://www.businessinsider.com/220-million-sheep-marketplace-bitcoin-theft-chase-2013-12 is an interesting case in point.

Also, any argument that BTC's pseudonymity will have drastic effects needs to explain why it's different from existing untracked means of transferring value, such as gold, in this perspective. Gold is easily bought and sold, and is less traceable than BTC; it's not even that "heavy and bulky" ($100,000 ~= 3kg of gold, about half a cupful; if your monthly income is "heavy and bulky" in gold, you're lucky). Bitcoin has the edge over gold in being able to be easily transferred online, but at the cost of those online transfers being public knowledge.

Bear in mind that if any legitimate business or person transacts with you in BTC, they're bound (in the UK, at least) by the same legal requirements with regards to declaring it for taxation purposes as if they'd transacted in USD or GBP (in traceable bank transfer, or anonymous cash, form) or gold. If I receive my income from my work in BTC instead of in pounds Sterling, my employer/customer and I are just as liable for correctly accounting for it for taxation purposes. People have tried evading tax by using alternative means of payment before ("payments in kind"), and there's already a framework in place to prevent it. Bitcoin is in no way "designed" for tax evasion; it's designed to allow pseudonymous transfers of Bitcoin amounts securely, while making that transfer entirely public as a side-effect. Whereas handing over gold or cash is anonymous. Is the fact that Bitcoin transfers can be done without moving physical objects really going to outweigh the traceability of Bitcoin in its usefulness for hiding income from tax authorities? So if Bitcoin won't help me avoid paying tax, it can't simply cause the death of the welfare state through fiscal starvation.

So let's look at how Bitcoin might be used to buy drugs, assassinations, child porn, and other illegal products and services. Whether you use a widely-known site like the Silk Road used to be (before it was shut down, having already been quietly infiltrated by the FBI some time ago) or a more discreet arrangement with a "dealer" contacted through word of mouth, you're going to be transferring some of your bitcoin to an address they provide. Perhaps you'll try and launder it through a mixing service first, but unless you're dealing in small amounts, those aren't very safe (even if the laundering service is "honest" and doesn't keep a log). So now you've sent your money to a criminal, and made a public record of it. If they, or another criminal they then send the money on to, are then caught using it as part of the proceeds of crime, it's linked to you. (Even more so if you used it to pay somebody to post drugs to your home address...)

If you'd handed them some cash (or gold), the link back to you is far more tenuous.

And if you're a criminal receiving Bitcoins for murders, child porn, or whatever, it's only a matter of time before one of those Bitcoin transactions is linked to a crime (either yours, or of a criminal customer of yours). So if you ever spend those Bitcoins on anything that gets delivered to your house, or convert it into other currencies at an exchange, that is now linked to your personal identity, and the police will come visiting you, as former Silk Road drug dealers are believed to be finding out at the time of writing.

I hold some bitcoins, which I've bought on exchanges. Not only are all those purchases available for examination by law enforcement - and each linked to my bank account details and, later, scans of my ID documents - but they all go to the same Bitcoin wallet, which means that they're linked to each other (and any illicit secret income from other sources) when I spend money, too. If I keep my illicit and legitimate bitcoins strictly separated (like I keep my public donation vanity addresses separate from my bought bitcoins, in order to preserve my privacy), then I can't spend my illicit earnings on shiny toys delivered to my house, and have to remain living like a pauper despite having vast theoretical wealth in ill-gotten gains. No fun!

Oh, and by the way, if your local intelligence agency decides to log Bitcoin traffic, they'll be able to see whose Internet connection you're emitting transactions on, too. Perhaps you can use Tor to avoid that, if you're careful to avoid timing attacks...

They're causing people to waste electricity on proofs of work

Despite the alarming figures in the article above, Bitcoin mining is a small fraction of the energy used by computers worldwide, and is likely to remain so. The carbon footprint of conventional banking and payments, with its extensive use of bits of paper, is also not to be sneezed at; and Bitcoin could replace that. Also, as the cost of power dominates the cost of a mining operation, a likely future trend is for bitcoin mining to occur in places where power is very cheap (such as near hydroelectric dams) or where heat is a desirable by-product which would have to be obtained via some means anyway (heating industrial processes or homes) - trends which cloud computing datacentres, which still dwarf bitcoin mining in power consumption, have already started to show.

People will steal computer power to generate Bitcoins

Botnets are losing their appeal for bitcoin mining, as it moves over to specialised hardware (the returns on mining with CPUs and GPUs decrease, a tendency that has arisen in the years since the paper linked to was written), and makes it increasingly hard for criminal botnet operators to dominate the Bitcoin supply, or take over the mining network in order to control the rules of the Bitcoin economy. Bitcoin gives botnet operators a new way to make money, which is a shame - but there's already plenty of reasons to run a botnet; eliminating them through better software security architectures and user education needs to remain a goal for us all...

The proportion of the wealth held by the top one percent of Bitcoin holders is significant

This is probably true (although it's hard to tell with the early-mined Bitcoins, which have generally never moved so can't be traced to an owner until they're spent), but this is largely due to the injustice of the larger world in which Bitcoin exists; since that wealth inequality holds for the people interested in buying Bitcoin, it ends up holding within Bitcoin, too. People converting their dollar fortunes into Bitcoin fortunes does nothing (directly) to change the wealth distribution of the world. What is more interesting is the effect of Bitcoin's value changes compared to the value of existing currencies; assuming Bitcoin continues to rise in value and become a fungible and liquid currency, there will be a generation of early-adopting crypto geeks (generally not very rich people) who will get rich off of it from early mining experiments or buying them as a curiosity when they were valued at a dollar or so, and a later generation of already-rich investors who bought them once they showed their tendency for exponentially rising value and got even richer. The latter group will have ridden the growth of Bitcoin to increase the wealth inequality, while the former group will presumably have used it to narrow the wealth gap, by going from not rich to rich.

But both will be a "one-off" event; once the Bitcoin price stabilises, the meteoritic growth will stop, and nobody can get rich from it again. Bitcoin is just following the same pattern as the value of shares in a successful tech company, although perhaps on a larger scale; it is an endemic problem of our economic system that such growth events make a few lucky early adopters rich from nothing, and a middle generation of quick investors even richer than they already were.

"Bitcoiners are techno-libertarian anarcho-syndicalists"

I've often heard it complained that Bitcoin adopters are crackpots with a fringe economic theory they're trying to force upon the world, either blind to its obvious flaws, or greedy to move to a system that will reward people in their situation, with no regard for the costs to humanity as a whole.

I'm sure some of them are. And I'm sure that some of its opponents are also crackpots with fringe economic theories of their own, which Bitcoin is a threat to.

But most Bitcoin enthusiasts are either people looking to make money through investing in it, or people who want a better way to pay for things online. I fall into the latter category; I was attracted to Bitcoin because I want to be able to pay my monthly outgoings from a cronjob, rather than setting up standing orders that get delayed if they happen to fall on a weekend or bank holiday, and because I want to be able to create Web applications that can accept payments without paying huge surchages, risks of chargebacks, and other such obstacles. I bought some bitoins back when they cost £2.20 each, in order to experiment with them and in order to try and promote a Bitcoin economy by spending them; I've managed to spend a few, but the range of available options was disappointingly small until quite recently. The immense growth in the value of my little hoard has been a pleasant surprise, to be honest, but I've never had the spare cash to be a proper investor!

Conclusions

Bitcoin has already changed the world, if subtly; and I think it's showing no signs of stopping. And I can't honestly tell if it's going to be a force for good or a force for bad, in the long run; we know so little about how economies actually work that we can't even predict the behaviour of the one we already have, yet alone theoretical new ones. But what I do know is that ours has lots of flaws, both in terms of the theoretical underpinnings of a debt-based economy, and the practical implementation of banks, markets, and taxation as we have them. The flaws in the current system are hard to address, even if we knew how to fix them, because it has a tremendous inertia; so, although I think Bitcoin has some definite advantages, and some definite disadvantages, and many unknowns, I think it's about time we took a risk and shook things up a little...

Glass Ceilings (by sarah)

Or why I can no longer work from home now Al is in an office.

Alaric has gone out of his way to help with my course taking Thursdays off work and working through his lunch brake on Fridays so I can attend lectures and has helped with the writing and craft stuff giving up weekend days to take me to events etc... but this morning he subjected me to the glass ceiling and wasn't even really aware he had done it. It happens quiet a lot and normally it doesn't matter that much as I am only trying to get a few of my own blog posts done or making stuff but today was the day I had set aside for my college coursework and business admin - just like Friday was.

It didn't happen on Friday as he ended up going into London so Mary couldn't go to nursery. I can write fiction and draw/knit a bit with the baby about but for anything I need to immerse myself in, it just doesn't work - she needs me too much - so that is course work or articles out of the question. On top of that I have been struggling not to feel like I need to sort the house out before I start work on the Mondays etc... I went back to college and that is a strain on both of us so house work (which we both do) has fallen behind.

His suggestion was to move up to the attic to work so after he left this morning I spent a while sorting things out so I could work upstairs. I've been finding I can work when I am in Bristol as I am away from the home and everything that needs doing - this wasn't an issue when Al was working from home as we were both there and me, him and Jeany would all be sitting there working together and taking breaks etc... Now it's just me.

I sat down and did half an hour of work - after a frantic morning of getting up early (after a night of no sleep due to Al having insomnia and keeping me awake), to get Mary to nursery before the school run instead of after it and taking the kitten for her shots after the school run. I was feeling really positive and happy about it all as I'd spent a while this morning answering Jeany's questions on mammal evolution which included the extinction of the dinosaurs and plate techtonics.

So when I heard Al bring the kitten home from the vets I rushed down stairs to give him a hug, and then I heard... Mary. He'd gotten stuck in traffic so was grumpy his getting up early had been in vein, He'd suggested yesterday that Mary stay at the house until lunch time so he didn't have to get up early and I'd explained I have deadlines and I needed the morning to work - I made sure Jean had clean uniform (which as the washing machine has been broken for the past two weeks involved me handwashing the stuff in the bath). I was sympathetic and assumed he'd be taking her in just a bit late. But no he was leaving her at home. The glass ceiling whacked me in the face, I threw over the bin and threw open a door with enough force to put the door handle through the plaster board. I cried and cried and wouldn't let him come near me.

He'd lowered the glass ceiling, not because he is a sexist pig because he isn't - but because he works in an office and I am working at home. If I had been in Bristol sitting in the library working then he wouldn't have been able to do that - it would not have been a solution to his problem ie he was now running late for work. He'd asked me what else he could of done - he'd tried his best which in truth he had - I know his finding things very stressful at the moment. But if I'd not been at home then bringing the baby back to me would not have been doable - he would have a) not made the vet appointment for one of the two busy weekday mornings in the first place (he had tried to get me to walk the kitten to the vet in the pushchair but I'd pointed out that this was my day for doing college work - I was AT WORK, I get two days - no make that mornings a week to get stuff done), and/or b) he would have taken Mary to nursery anyway and been late.

Al left hurt and angry as I really could not communicate what he had done, I was too hurt and angry myself. And of course I hurt my hand in the door slamming as it rebounded on me :/ This was exactly the sort of issue I hoped to avoid this time - I'm extra peeved as I am paying for nursery time that is now not being used so Mary is loosing out too 🙁 Of course Alaric gave me part of the money being used for that in the first place.

So basically I can't work from home is my conclusion, Friday I will hopefully be going into college to work instead. I say hopefully because of course the thing is that Al getting to work is very important, he earns the money that pays the mortgage and most of the bills, anything I earn is the extra and so sick children who can't go to school or nursery end up at home with me. And do you know the really sad tragic thing about all of this?

Al would love to be at home looking after the kids and tinkering with his projects.

Breast Feeding Vouchers (by sarah)

So the idea is that breast feeding mums will be rewarded with £200 worth of vouchers to spend in supermarkets or on the high street as laid out in this BBC story. Great idea? Will increase the numbers of breastfeeding mums and after all breast is best right?

Well no, to be honest this will just make things worse for new mums and I doubt it will have much affect on the numbers as £200 verses your actual wages may not equate. For a start the scheme will financially punish those who can't breastfeed or who's babies can't take lactose or those that want or have to go back to work, the result of which will be that mums will feel even more of a failure over something that is beyond their control. When I had Jean I was desperate to Breastfeed, during the early pregnancy I had a plan to still breastfeed whilst working on research at the Natural History Museum which they were supportive of - I was very ill so sadly that didn't come to pass. Then I struggled for 5 and a half months not able to take my stronger pain killers and the breast feeding itself was painful as hell and she was a hungrier baby so I had to supplement almost straight away.

I cried when the Dr told me to stop - but the baby had bitten both breasts hard enough to make me bleed and the bruising was bad enough that I just couldn't do it anymore. With Mary I was stopped at 3 and a half months and I cried again and felt very bad but my body was confused by the hormones and every time I breastfeed my bleeding got heavier and heavier result in several trips to the hospital including casualty.

There are others in similar positions due to babies not taking the milk or it making them sick, milk not kicking in, infections, the need for sleep causing mental breakdowns and so on - what affect will this scheme have on women who like me had problems with breastfeeding, bearing in mind they already feel awful about not doing the 'best' for their baby - Breast is Best but sometimes you just can't and that makes you feel like a bad mother - a fail mother and this is a dangerous time for new mums. This can increase the chances of the mother sliding into the old baby blues.

Breast feeding is already an emotive issue for mothers, but it is worse than that - domestic abusers will use the vouchers as a new form of bullying and a reason to withhold money from the mother. I say domestic abusers rather than partners or boyfriends as it can be other family members. Add in the issue with the obvious slant that women shouldn't go back to work for this incentive to work and you have a nasty bundle of disempowerment.

It will also increase the class distinctions in this country as those that are militant about breastfeeding tend to be upper middle class women who do not need to go back to work - they will be getting the rewards for not really doing anything extra whilst the mums that have to go back to work will not get the reward. The single mum who can't work due to looking after her kids maybe better off with it depending on how it's handled but things being as they are I wonder if they will dock it out of something else she gets.

Now the thing is it would be a great idea to increase breastfeeding but this is not the way! Breastfeeding pushers are already resented by a lot of women as they just do not seem to appreciate what the average women has to do in their lives. It is seen as a faddy thing homeschooling mothers do etc... And on top of that sometimes you get shouted at when you breastfeed in public or chucked out of restaurants (women are actually protected by law in the UK for breastfeeding but somehow that doesn't always matter plus many new mums are not given this vital piece of information and it is only up until the child is 6 months were as the WHO recommend breast feeding up to 2 yrs). Here is an article that shows just how confusing this can be and how pressured mums can end up being to 'breast feed acceptably' because it's not already an big enough issue for them.

And you get stories like this one where a judge informs a woman to stop breastfeeding her ten month old so it can stay over with it's dad. Our society sends mixed messages about breastfeeding and women are feeling the pressure.

So how do you increase breastfeeding number? After all it is a good idea for both mother and child to have that breast feeding time, from a health and an emotional point of view - if they can.

1) Make sure that pubs and restaurants are breastfeeding friendly - what ever the law says the mother has to feel safe to actually breast feed efficiently.

2) Get the idea out there that breastfeeding is normal and not something to be scurried away and hidden - My Dad said that in the 40's and 50's when he was growing up there were babies attached to breasts in the street - that was just how it was and he would be lifted up to see the baby whilst it was still attached to the nipple.

3) Support don't preach what ever the outcome or need of the mother/baby - breastfeeding is being seen as something privileged mothers use to badger those that aren't, to say 'I'm better than you as I breast fed.' Some of the midwives/health workers are quiet frankly scary in their zeal over the thing, meaning mothers feel bullied into breast feeding.

4) Show mothers what to do! Conversely to the previous point - the problems I had with Jeany were preventable, I was not shown how to breast feed and so spent 5 and a half months doing it wrong and causing myself a lot of pain and Jean not to be getting the best feed. If I had been shown I may have managed the 2 yrs I was hoping for. Support groups are few and far between and tend to be full of the 'preachers' but I think if they were more accessible then that would alter and women would feel more secure knowing there was a support network there. But the other thing is that these support groups are all voluntary and often have no finance to speak of.

5) In house/work creches or ones within five minutes of where you are working with the flexibility to allow you to take breast feeding breaks, at the moment this is only high end jobs but they do exist but for breastfeeding numbers to truly go up you need this sort of thing in place in Tesco, ASDA, Morrisons etc... the police are ok with this in they tend to allow expressed milk to be kept in the work fridge etc...

6) Help women not to feel ashamed of their bodies in the first place - this is perhaps the biggest hurdle to breastfeeding, women are shy, embarrassed, worried about their breasts and the publics reactions. Breasts have been turned into sexual objects, women with nothing on is seen as on giant billboards but a woman sitting breast feeding is not which is an insane way round for things to be.

7) After generations of pharma produced formula and mothers being told that that was best for baby, don't expect a rapid over night change in behaviour and then see it's absence as a failure of gentler incentives. Use the breast feeding fights cancer sound bites and things to grow awareness and tackle the idea that parent hood should be hidden. There are people out there who really do still believe that breast feeding mothers should not leave the house.

Ada Lovelace Day 2013 (by sarah)

Ada Lovelace Day is a celebration of women in technology and science - it was started a few years ago by the lovely Suw, and me and Al have taken part in it every year so far! One day we might even make it to London for some of the talks and things that happen (this year they even had Neil Gaiman though we saw him at the weekend anyway but still!) - sadly (or happily) I have college this week so that was another year of no Ada events boo hiss.

This year we have chosen the designer of... Sugru!

Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh - she is an extra special inspiration to me, as not only has she had the idea for and then developed and sold sugru, a funky silicon rubber you can fix things or improve things with, but she shows that art and science together can drive innovation to make the world better! (I've already blogged about that here).

The story goes that she had the idea whilst doing her MA in design production in London, the first attempts were smelly and ugly and then they weren't but they didn't stick to enough things. She knew what she wanted it to do and she teamed up with scientists but didn't just hand the job over.

Alaric told me about the sugru before you could actually buy the stuff - I was sad as I was being told that I was never going to achieve anything being a scientific artist or artistic scientist, his words were something like, 'but there's this new stuff that's amazing sort of like air dry putty but is still flexible and strong and stuff and it was invented by an artist who knew wanted a substance that didn't exist for her designs so she went and learnt about the chemistry of rubber and silicon!'

The story of sugru and the company built up around it is fascinating and can be found here.

It is not just about the sugru or the science behind it - it is about determination and following your dream, of keeping going even when it looks like you are set to fail. They have run out of money and risen from the ashes. Their mottos are 'The Future Needs Fixing' and 'Hack Things Better' which goes straight back to Jane's core idea - she didn't want to keep buying new things all the time - she wanted to fix the broken things or upgrade what she already had. This is perfect for upcyclers and reusing recyclers like me and Alaric and as it turns out many many other people.

She has given the world a new way to make things, to fix things! It is technology and engineering, it is art and science and it is wonderful.

The word sugru means to play - it is a corruption of an irish word and we have taken it at its base meaning - so far we have made/fixed:

Purely arty objects:

My first sugru project of a flower and metal bracelet

Little creatures for the visually impaired and blind to touch and explore

Fixed things:

knives with manky split handles

Broken mugs that have sentimental value as our little ones have decorated them

The sink - in several ways!

Made things better:

My crutches needed a bit of handle alteration to stop my little finger going numb when I used them

Little feet on phones and lap tops to stop them over heating

Decorations for boring welly slippers (this came out of a failed project to fix shoes with the stuff)

Improved the hooks in the kitchen so things don't fall off anymore

Embedded electronics into head dresses

Embedded magnets onto things like our phones so they are easily mountable in the car

And these are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head!

It has been to the poles, to the desert, under the sea and even in space!

So thankyou Jane for being an inspiration and our Ada Lovelace Day hero of 2013 🙂