Freesteel

Two days before I head south, less than a week before I go to Austria. I’ll have to go caving once because the freezer is full of spit samples to form a base-line so when they measure the amount of hormones in my spit just before going down a big scary pitch, they scientifically prove I’m miserable.

Have written some tosh for the undemocracy site. Who knows who will read it. Maybe even the Sec. Gen. These guys at the top don’t want people to know if they’re checking stuff said down at the bottom. Or they prefer to live in their bubble.

Last night I set up wikiscuba page for Tiree. Hoping someone will add to it, so there’s enough information eventually for me to want to go there. It doesn’t feature in any of the kayaking or dive guide books.

Proof that there are nations are a figment of the imagination, there are no borders, comes from the fact that they can’t be counted. As already noted, the United Nations can’t say how many there are. In a self-referential system, nations only exist only in the subjective reality of nations. Only 24 nations recognize Taiwan exists. How many of those are 24 are recognized by the other 100 +- 100 nations around the world?

Nothing else cooking, except bugs suddenly coming in thick and fast down from Denmark with me trying to punt them off.

There’s a caving club called UBSS who have the best caving library in the country. Unfortunately, none of their catalogue is on-line even slightly, because they have to wait till they have enough volunteer money and time to do it properly.

Might I suggest that a series of digital snapshots of the shelves taken with a good camera would provide an impression, which could perhaps raise some interest? Or would it look too cavalier to a grant awarding authority. Maybe they can’t find anyone who’s willing to take snapshots without sticking big fat copyright notices all over the print to protect the world from gaining any benefit from their creativity instant — pressing the button whilst holding the expensive box in the appropriate direction.

The UBSS takes its implied copyright notices very seriously. Back in the good old days of 1981 there wasn’t such a thing as the internet, so if you wrote an article, you had to get it published in print in some journal before anyone could find it and read it. Many corporate-owned journals used their control of this gateway to require that copyright be transfered from its rightful creator to themselves in order to obtain a legal monopoly over the information. That’s because corporations are interested in maximizing their profit, and nothing else.

The owners of The American Journal of Malaria, for example, don’t give a toss if making all their articles open access could save a considerable number of lives by enabling wider dissemination of critical information, if it could possibly cut into their bottom line. Lives aren’t part of the equation.

…but …but …Julian, if they can’t make a profit, then the journal will go out of business, and no one will get to read these articles.

Who said anything about going out of business? The problem is maximizing the profit. Gouging. Screwing for as much as you can those who are willing to pay in order to optimize the revenue stream. Not taking any interest in the lives of those on the other side, who might in the future benefit you, but don’t have the cash or sufficient curiosity to bother with it today. It’s the laws of business. Each unit has to maximize its local income as much as it can and take advantage of any outside weakness.

That’s why we’re in favour of child labour. Children aren’t born with any money, so they certainly start with a disadvantage there. As long as we don’t care that we get a generation of illiterate young adults in twenty years time, it’ll all be fine.

So, the UBSS publishes a learned journal called Proceedings. If you type in one of the articles published there, which someone in your club authored about a caving region your club goes to, and you post it on the web, someone will eventually come round in ten years time and bust you. Apparently, the CUCC response wasn’t humble enough. (I must remember that if blogspot.com attempts to charge me for the contents of the blog I wrote on their server, then I should refrain from telling them to get lost.) Hosting the article on-line potentially interferes with their “revenue stream” which, circa 1981, is £3.00 an issue, and there even any of those particular yellowing volumes for sale.

According to the accounts on page 5 of their June 2007 newsletter (paid for by an irrelevant advert from Wards Solicitors), the club made £969.90 from sales of publications. How this breaks down between subscriptions from libraries who take everything that looks learned by default plus old members who are forced to buy copies as part of their subs, and the rip-roaring trade in the back catalogue, I am told is something I have to contain my curiosity about, since the information would not be accurate and there’s no intention of being misleading. (Something very Civil-Servant-ish about that excuse, isn’t there?)

So, in absence of that, I just allow myself to be mislead by the superficial crappiness of the back-catalogue system — not much helped by the attempt to contract it out to ArchLib at £2.50 per article — the listed printing and postage expenses of the journal, £1450 and £265.55 respectively, and suspect that most of it is due to the latest issue. Incidentally, the printing and postage expenses were half that which they were the year before, and while printing might have radically changed in price, postage won’t have done. Hmm. I wonder what’s going on here.

The club also made a surplus of £2108.13 which, due to changes in accounting procedure, was hard to disguise. Also hard to disguise is the £20,054.60 of cash in the bank from which the club derived £553.55 of interest.

Now, getting back to the issue of maximizing the bank balance at the expense of all other activities, and not spending money that’s sitting around on anything cool and in support of speleology due to an apparent attitude that it’s better to keep hold of every grubbing penny in a tight Scrooge fist so that the exact same cash is still there in two hundred years time when all the caves are under water due to sea level rise, where does that put us today?

Well, it makes it hard to raise money.

According to page 7 of the May 2006 newsletter, there are thousands of historic photographic glass slides dating back to the 1920s peacefully rotting away waiting for some grant giving body to give something so that no one need dip into the 20 useless grand in the bank. Like hell, anyone would. The point about giving a money to an organization is that it’s supposed to be spent, or have plans to be spent. If it’s still sitting in the bank 30 years later, then there’s been a misunderstanding. That’s not what I’d give money for. And I don’t think anyone else would either.

So far, none of these lovely glass slides have been scanned or uploaded onto, say, Wikimedia Commons. What are they waiting for? Is it that the entire set has to be perfectly scanned to a million pixels per inch before the first image is available? Maybe we ought to watch the library to catch fire one day so we can see the librarian running out empty-handed, claiming that he he couldn’t save the entire collection intact, he chose not to bring out one book.

To be fair, the UBSS has put up on the web scans of some very old logbooks, which is pretty cool. See page 27 of that 1946-1947:

Note: When Hon. Sec. arrived Hut in Revolting Mess - Everything Lying Around - VERY BAD Not good enough!

More like that please. Ranting! Less boring f*** money, Commercial Confidentialities, Intellectual Property hang-ups, Rights, Wrongs, Respect. It’s a caving club. Not a Mickey Mouse Club. How do you think we took on the Government? By asking for permission?

Lots of Germans came to stay in Liverpool. Not much work or blogging occurred.

No one to see in Edinburgh. But I did discover this fine pub called The Auld Hoose across the road with free WiFi, good beer and good food, and spent plenty of time there. I didn’t wake up in time to photograph Becka huddling across the road from it at 8am in the morning in the drizzle downloading her email from their router which was obviously left on.

Then after the conference we went to St Abbs with our kayaks and managed to do six dives in 24 hours, as well as stumbling across a famous caver while out on the sea. He had recently moved to Eyemouth and had found his kayaks in a dumpster, and had in fact tried our kayak-diving off an inflatable.

I have just wasted my time writing two new wikipedia articles: HMS Port Napier and Flame shell.

Quick stop-off in an internet cafe in Edinburgh before the batteries run out. It’s been quite a week. At last I’ve seen a flame shell. But then after a week of too much kayaking to dive sites I fell asleep in the rain on the park bench while Becka cycled off to fetch the car, come back, park it, and take the camera off my lap and photograph me. More write-ups to follow.