New Projects

I need a project to try to take my mind off several unpalatable facts:
1. My contract ends in two weeks and after that I've got nothing
2. I'm 49 in 4 weeks
3. My wife's employer will pay me a salary for 4 months as a sort of apology for making me relocate to the middle of nowhere and away from my job.
4. I've been in borderline personality disorder relapse for over two years

My son is into Warhammer 40,000 and I like the modelling side of this (although not so much the nerd-tactic gaming side, no sir)

I found a Tau vehicle in the codex called a Drone Harbinger that I'd not heard of before.  It's based on the Devilfish APC but has a simplified hatch and an enlarged cargo section with more doors.  It's cool in game too because it produces many many drones which rock in combat.

I'm thinking I'd like to make an add-on module with all the features of a Harbinger, that I can magnetise and then add to either of my son's existing devilfish hulls to make the vehicle without having to keep it that way.  Tau empire tanks are all modular so with the generous use of neodymium mini magnets you can turn just about any vehicle into just about any other by adding and removing parts.

My first task is to gather the extra parts I'll need.  I think a spare hull rear plate, a couple of light gun drones with plasma carbines, three Devilfish assault doors and maybe a new rear hatch.  The Harbinger has two smaller drone deployment hatches in the rear plate, instead of one large troop ramp.

Usually easy to obtain from eBay but listings are a little scarce at the moment, and I object to paying shipping from the USA that is four times the asking price of the part.  The other sections I'll try to model with sheet styrene or possibly green stuff or similar.  Probably both.

Another ongoing project is to make some human warriors for the Tau army, called "Gue'vesa" in the game.  These are basically humans soldiers that have defected to the Tau.  I don't think they're especially spectacular in battle but since we have the Vespers and the Kroot already to fight alongside the Tau, I'd like to complete the set.

The Tau have other allied races but these are the only ones to participate in ground combat, apart from perhaps the Demiurg, kind of WH40K versions of dwarfs, which have been loosely associated with Squats, a discontinued minor race from the metal miniatures days that no longer appear in the codex.

There are some rumours circulating that a race similar to the Squats may be added to the game in the near future with a codex and everything, but since the Harlequins are so big right now I'm not holding my breath.

You make Gue'vesa by combining parts of human Imperial Guard Cadians and Tau Fire Warriors.  There is an on-line "recipe" for this conversion already (at http://warhammer-tau-army.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/alien-allies-for-tau-guevesa.html) so it should just be a better of doing it and not screwing up too much.  I have pretty much gathered all the required bits for this project.

Here is an image of the Gue'vesa from the site above. I don't expect mine to turn out this good.

I'll blog updates on both projects, with pictures, as and when I make progress.

Laters....

The fear of knowing and the fear of not knowing

We went Ely today and saw a rental property that didn't suck too much so I guess I've seen where I'll be spending my next few months,  employed or otherwise.

Meanwhile,  the GI problems are back with a vengeance and I have some invasive tests to look forward to on Monday.   It might be IBS,  but it might be cancer.   I never thought I'd be this frightened but all I can think about right now is that I might die before I even get a new job.

We found we could but we never asked if we should...

In April 1912, a cable laying ship out of Halifax,  Nova Scotia called the Mackay Bennett was hired by the White Star Line to recover the floating corpses of those who had died during the sinking of RMS Titanic.   They took enough provisions to process about 70 bodies but when they reached the site of the tragedy they found hundreds.

They were forced then to choose whose body would be recovered  and whose would not,  ultimately deciding to return the bodies of third class passengers to the sea.   There was one exception,  the body of an unidentified third class little boy was brought back.   When nobody claimed the body from the makeshift morgue in Halifax,  the hard bitten crew of the ship paid for a decent burial and the "unknown child"  lay in Halifax cemetery for almost a century.

Then,  a fame-hungry scientist and amateur "Titanic expert" from Lakeheath,  Ontario named Ryan Parr persuaded the authorities to allow exhumation of the child's body for DNA testing.   The results were not entirely conclusive but the child was tentatively  identified.  The thing is,  nobody really benefitted from this desecration,  with the possible exception of Professor Parr. 

Instead,  the simple beauty of the generous act by the crew of the Mackay Bennett was nullified by one man's thirst for fame and a scientific community who failed to ask itself whether it really should do this.  

I'm a scientist working in an archaeology  group and I was ashamed when I learned of the exhumation.   It sullied all scientists with its grubby tabloid intrusion.  The ancient DNA studying community is chock full of these grave-robbers,  justifying their dubious Burke and Hare skullduggery in the name of science and human advancement.  Shame on you Ryan Parr.  Shame on all of you.

Just when you thought it was safe...

Well,  having returned from Cambridgeshire,  having agreed that living in some parts of Ely would work and even having located some friends for the kids,  the peckerheads at Pfizer announce a buy out bid for AZ.  Awesome,  it will have upset quite a few applecarts I reckon.

So the hard deadline for a decision in June has gone out of the window and all bets are off.   Thanks for that.

Problem A: M.  Soriot  et al. have fattened AZ up to the point where it's a huge takeover target,  particularly for sharks like Pfizer who have 70bn. in the UK and need to spend it here to avoid a giant tax bill.   It's win win for them since AZ have almost no significant liabilities and heavily consolidated stock so only a few voting dominoes need to defect to make this happen.

Problem B:   I've been applying for jobs like crazy in Cambridge whereas now it looks like I might have to find funding to remain at Manchester in the next ten months or so which is a hell of a hill to climb.   I have some sketchy research ideas but these days you need to get preliminary data and the researcher with spare capacity to allow this is in no apparent rush to get started and my potential collaborator has gone missing.  The alternative is to go through redeployment again.  Big fun.

Option c involves an oven bag and a nitrogen cylinder,  and it's getting harder to keep THAT door closed.

Pain, sleep and bad bad dreams

Drug dependence is very odd.  It creeps up on you and before you know it you are addicted to multiple prescription medications without even realising that it's happening.

In my case I'm struggling with Valium, Venlafaxine and Tramadol, mainly, although I have to admit that Kalms have become a problem for me too.  If you look up Kalms, they contain Valerian root extract which is supposed to be non-addicting but if that were true, I wouldn't need a handful each night just to conk out, would I?  Valerian extract is also associated with cardiac arrythmias, which might explain the palpitations, dizziness, racing heart beat and fainting.

Added to the nightly Quetiapine dosing, they are turning me into a zombie.  I also have terrible, frightening dreams and I feel sick and dizzy and sedated almost all the time.

I can't rule out the possibility that taking dozens of Kalms tablets is related to self harm, but I think it would definitely be described as para-suicidal behaviour.

It's been very stressful lately.  Paying out for would dressings has effectively landed me in the poor-house, not that it took much of a shove when you compare my take-home salary with my liabilities.   I've started really hurting myself again.  There's a couple of pretty bad wounds that I "service" every day, by which I mean I deepen them or make them more severe.  This is extremely painful but gives me some relief from my inner fears and pains but in the long run are like white flags of surrender.

As the "fact-finding trip" to Cambridge draws closer and closer I find myself getting more and more divergent in my behaviour.  I care less and less about things going on around me, I just find myself wishing I was alone so I could fuck myself up some more.

I'm dreading the trip the most because it might be the point at which the kids get invested in the whole relocation thing and that would leave me alone in opposition and fear.

Is it wrong of me to hope that
a. I die before the move (working on it)
and/or
b. the children hate it there so much that my wife actually listens to us and kicks AZ to the kerb?

If we do have to move this summer it's going to be a hell of a mountain to climb to get the house and garden sorted.  the loft alone could take days and many trips to the tip, and as for the garden, the badgers seem to have gone but it still looks like Vimy Ridge with shrubs out there.  Better get the big spade out then.  The leaking, rotten garden shed should be a particular laugh as its chock full of stuff that used to be in the garage (now the kids play room).  several room need re-decorationg and i have to do my least favourite ever job, re-grouting the bathroom.  Ugh.

Fear, Loathing and Intellectual Property Hijacking in Academia

As a researcher in academia, likely as not you work for a Principal Investigator (PI), who also mages several other researchers, and your contract will typically be fixed at 1-3 years, after which you need to generate more grant income from an awarding body or charity, or you need to leave and find another job.

With very few exceptions, taking the latter road is taken to mean that your PI is allowed to airbrush your efforts out of the history of the group's work.  This manifest itself most commonly in scientific papers published after you have left the group which revolve, partly or wholly, around research work you did, but which do not credit you as a co-author.

"So what?" I hear you cry.

Publication of research articles, particularly in leading Journals, is the number one metric by which the work performance is assessed in academia, the other main ones being grant income generated and the "h index", a statistic which ranks you according to how many papers you publish, what the "impact factor" of the journals are in which you publish and the number of other papers which have cited your work.

To see your work published by former PI's and colleagues without attribution or acknowledgement of your contribution amounts to theft of Intellectual Property (IP), but it has been widely accepted as the norm, but one which presents the wronged party with a dilemma.  If one were to challenge the papers either at the institution level or by contacting the journal's editor in chief to point out that one had not been given due credit for the work described in a paper, the very best outcome is that the paper gets withdrawn, a shameful exercise in which nobody wins, a classic example of a lose-lose situation.  On the other hand, the longer the unethical practise of mis-attribution goes unreported, the more widespread and acceptable it seems to become.  In the era of "open science", the public are assured that the research process is transparent and above reproach, whereas in actual fact the mechanisms of obfuscation have merely become more sophisticated.

Another common conceit in academia, this time in palaeo-biology, is the way in which "cartels" of scientific researchers might all subconsciously collude to ignore a known weakness in a widely used scientific technique because it would undermine the credibility of everyone's published work.

A good example of this is the way archaeological samples of mitochondrial DNA are grouped into categories called haplogroups (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup) based on a limited number of DNA mutations, in which the mutations present or absent define the group, all based on a DNA sequence called the Cambridge Reference Sequence (CRS).

This type of classification ignores the bulk of the DNA sequence data and can thus be very misleading, but it is very widely used in palaeo-biology to track the migration of humans out of their ice-age refugia to recolonise the European continent, and also to trace the highly controversial diffusion of Neolithic farming cultures from the fertile crescent.  Everyone in the field knows that using haplogroups loses or ignores so much information that it isn't nearly as powerful as comparing the entire DNA sequences from different individuals, but ancient DNA is usually quite heavily degraded and the number of specimens is very low (ranging typically from one to about fifty).  The use of haplogroups purports to obviate these limitations, but it is generally ignored that this comes at a cost in fidelity and results that often mislead or muddy the picture at least as much as they illuminate.

Science is rotten to the core, driven as much by politics (PI's going after professorships), money and the way it always flows to "fashionable" or "sexy" big-science, blue sky topics, as it is by the high-minded ideals the scientists would like the public to think they have.

Cambridge ... Back on again and right soon

Well, after a winter of doubt and hope, AstraZeneca appear to have succeeded in financially incentivising my spouse into a pro-Cambridge position once again, and next week we're dragging the kids to Cambridgeshire to scout it out, particularly around Ely which seems on paper to be an OK location although it's just a small town with lots of tourists visiting the cathedral, lots of floodplain houses and absolutely nothing else for miles in any direction.

Having grown accustomed to having varying sizes of big town on my doorstep in addition to Marple (which Ely approximates) and pretty good public transport to those places, it's going to be a dull and isolated life and I've got a horrible feeling that we're going to be seeing WAY too much of my wife's workmates as they'll be the only people we know for a hundred miles.

Another down side is that rather than the regular trips to see her family that, while painful and awkward, last a few hours at worst, they'll be regularly descending on us for entire weekends instead.  This is going to be one of the hardest things for me to accept, given the precipitate way we were forced to flee my Sister-in-Law's house when my son was a baby after being given temporary shelter there while some cowboy builders fucked up out house.  We slightly outstayed our welcome and were forced to return to an unheated shell in the dead of winter with a 9-month old baby after an acrimonious incident.

Another downside is that Cambridgeshire is geographically closer to my Parents, although it probably takes about as long to get from Ely to there as the roads are unbelievably shit caravan and tractor-ridden country roads.

We're also investigating Royston, although the frankly staggering house prices in Ely will seem like small change if we have to buy something very small here.  The only thing it has in its favour is that it is feasible to commute to and from London from here whereas Ely is much harder.  I might need to be open to jobs in the capital in order to get a job at all. Travelling on the tube again...woohoo.  I'd rather die.  Seriously, smother me in my sleep.

Despite my brief interlude of peace when I started on Quetiapine tablets, my self harm is now getting worse again as this trip gets closer, and I'm getting more and more disconnected and suicidal again as I can't envision myself moving to this Godforsaken corner of nowhere.  Apart from anything else I've just about bankrupted myself paying for dressings for the wounds, so maybe something more permanent is now called for.  Like a spot of track-surfing.

I won't pretend I ever settled down in the North West and the job I'm in is boring me to death and stressing me out in equal measure because I just don't know what I'm doing.  But at least I'm on a waiting list for therapy here, which I will have to go back to square one with in Cambs.  We'll also be taking the kids away from their friends and their lives.  My daughter is very happy at School and at her Dance School, with a large circle of friends.  My son is just starting to break through to where he needs to be academically and also has a decent group of friends, some of whom aren't utter little pricks, and we centre our annual timetable around the local Cricket Club, where he goes to winter nets, spring training and summer games, plus we've Lancashire Cricket Club a short(ish) train and tram ride away and many summer tournaments which are glorious.  It makes me choke down a lump in my throat when I think of the future he has here, a place that makes him happy, and that this move will steal from him.

I feel like we're betraying our kids and our principles because a certain AZ executive of Greek extraction doesn't know when to shut the fuck up and stop kissing board-of-directors arse.  Yes AZ will theoretically be better placed for research interfacing with clinical collaborators at Addenbrookes but I used to work at Northwick Park for the MRC and I know exactly how much interfacing actually goes on: fuck all, it was a expensive failure that got moved to Hammersmith only to fail again.  Plus they could have just relocated into Manchester and been right next to the Christie Hospital and the new CRUK National Cancer Research Centre for less money and without ruining the lives of the many thousands of people who are being swept along in this torrent of shit because their spouses work for the mighty Arse-traZeneca.

The worst day

This is the very lowest my mood has ever been.  I feel like I'm in a coffin, buried and forgotten, in a lonely abandoned winter graveyard.  This is the end.

After the threat of social services intervention was lifted yesterday, I am only now succumbing to the after effects of my betrayal by the Stepping Hill Home Treatment Team.

I can't remember when my mood was as low as it is now, everything is a a colossal effort and it feels as though I'm embedded in an invisible viscous tarry substance that makes even getting out of bed for a pee feel like weight-lifting.

This entry is unlikely to be very long because of this.

My self harm has accelerated dramatically.  I've inflicted seven deep wounds so far today.  The compulsion is so strong I can't resist it, it's like watching a movie of someone else hurting themselves, except that I feel the pain.  I'm so out of body today.  I just wish I could sleep but I'm so tolerant to benzodiazepines now that 20 mg Valium doesn't even slow me down.

I'm supposed to be seeing my GP and discussing my progress with weaning myself of Valium tomorrow but the last few days have undone all the good work I'd done over the preceding 3 weeks.

Work is utter hell and I can't face it.  Nothing works.  I spend weeks and months trying to model stuff or analyse data only to be left with very little of substance.  I can't concentrate.

I know I'm going to have to take some serious time off soon but I also know that it's the top of a very slippery downward slope.

I wish i had a real friend who could help me out but i seem to have lost all of mine.

My secret life as a self-harmer and would-be suicide

Self harm is a common type of externalisation for a number of depressive or personality disorders.  It is very common in young adults, less so at my age (47).

A few months ago I started self-harming.

I couldn't and still can't identify a causative event, and I've suffered from mental illness (borderline Personality Disorder, PTSD, Depression, Anxiety) since childhood, but in all that time I had never deliberately hurt myself.

The only thing I can It roughly coincided with when I started to abuse Valium in a serious way (I'm at 20 mg a day now , but tapering off with a doctor's help using smaller dose tablets). Unfortunately that's led to me using a lot of Kalms as well, which contain numerous herbal hypnotics and sedatives including Valerian extract, a well known addictive substance from the "Great Binge" era.

I started small, a few abrasions with a pumice stone, followed by dressing the wound and clearing up the mess, it felt like someone caring and apparently released endorphins, which is why, I suspect, it has now taken over my life.  I usually did it if I had had an argument with or felt belittled by my wife, or if there was shouting of any description, which messes badly with my PTSD.  Verbal and physical violence are the same thing to my fucked up brain.  It was, I realise also a symbolic way of hurting those that hurt me.  If asked why I injure myself, I would say "it's because no one else will let me".  My suicide attempts are, in the same way, redirected homicidal urges.  For example, if I kill myself, my kids still have one parent, but if I killed my spouse, they wouldn't have any, as I'd be imprisoned for 20 years or more and emerge an old man.  The ineluctable logic of suicide.  Protecting ones kids is a categorical imperative and BPD/PTSD amplifies this, in the form of heightened hyper-vigilance and the hiding or explaining away of symptoms or injuries.

At first it felt, as I said, like someone caring about my pain and inner turmoil when no-one external seemed to.  It also had the added benefit of diffusing suicidal feelings and relieving anxiety, although I have made three serious suicide attempts in the past two months, that's another story, and an extension of another form of self-harm, deliberate SSRI overdosing to induce mild serotonin syndrome, which enabled me to be "ill" and stay in bed.

I think it was the addictive effect of he endorphins are what got me in the end though, and I'm finding now that I self harm several times a day, in more and more extreme ways.  I'm addicted to hurting myself and growing increasingly tolerant.

I started deepening the abrasions and increasing the bleeding with my razor, then a hobby knife and now I routinely use the reciprocal saw tool on my trusty Gerber multi-tool to really get the claret flowing.  I use Mepore dressings but if I've really hacked away at myself I have to add tape of waterproof dressings over the top to stop blood seeping through my clothes.

For those of you that don't know, a reciprocal saw is one with two rows of teeth running in opposite directions:


It's very effective.

On ironing days (most of Saturday and Sunday), I use the iron to make very painful, slow healing burns that evolve into seeping, bloody lesions after a day of two.  I've even carved words and pictures into my skin with a large blunt paper clip which gives broader strokes than a sharp knife would.  I do it at work, on the commute, at home, even in shop toilets.

And to cap all, if a wound starts to heal, I don't seem to be able to resist attacking it again, so most cuts take many weeks to fade to ugly scars.

My wife gets very distressed by all this and until recently I was hiding them from my young kids by only making wounds where a t-shirt and shorts would cover them, but having been caught at it buy both of them now, I have stopped bothering with that.  I am using bio-oil on the scars to try and get them to fade but to be honest I'm just as likely to make a new hole over an old scar now and the oil makes the dressings fall off.

The psychiatric "profession" seem helpless to stem this new tide and I spend my life in constant physical pain as a result, every time I bump into something or hug my kids the odds are it presses on at least one deep wound and makes me shout out sometimes it hurts so much.   Lying in bed is torture. To get any relief I have to take such a mammoth cocktail of painkillers that I get an actual hangover the next morning, plus the painkillers become slightly less effective.  add to this the fact that since my last suicide bid NICE guidelines have me on fortnightly prescriptions, forcing me to eke out my meds.

It has left me isolated and in worse shape psychologically than ever.  I am so lonely and desperately want to die at this point.  I've looked on the Exit international website and the components of the suicide bag are so expensive they make your head spin.  I could put one together after hours with equipment in the lab here for free but then some poor PhD student or cleaner would have to deal with finding my corpse the next morning. More than anything the two things that have inhibited many suicide bids have been fear of failure (and ending up crippled or worse) and sympathy for the poor sod who has to clear it up.  I used to be the thought my kids, but somehow the thought of them living on without me doesn't fill me with such profound sadness any more.  Maybe my increasing age and thus proximity to natural mortality lessens that feeling, or maybe the Valium numbs it.

Oddly, I keep thinking about my next holiday and how I won't get a tan because I'm essentially a grotesque mass of scar tissue and too ashamed to uncover.  I might not even wear shorts next year as some of my wounds have been in the ankle area.  Ah the random processes of the sick mind.

BPD very bad

Borderline Personality Disorder is Hell.  It really is.

Take today, I've been physically removed from the road in front of speeding traffic by a good Samaritan because I was in some kind of depersonalisation fugue, I've almost fallen down several escalators, I feel high but not in a good way and I've done so much self harm that my left arm looks like it's been in a garbage disposal unit.

Why is this happening now?

I could blame the Cambridge thing, or course, particularly the way Astra-Z continue to refuse to confirm or deny that we're a. going and b. when we're going IF we're going at all.

Uncertainty and instability are generally very bad things when you have BPD.

Nobody really understands BPD well enough to make that sort of causal link though.

It's actually much more distressing for my family than it is for me.  If I nod off in front of a tram again like the other day, and nobody is around, I'll just get killed and my problems will be over.

Trouble is, the affordable and/or free provision for BPD families is shit, with a 16-week waiting list and the private stuff comes in at £50/hr, well out of our reach.

Yesterday I spent the day with my head under the covers or in the bath room cutting myself, I've gone through over a hundred wound dressings in two weeks and the ones I have on desperately need changing as I can smell the yuckiness all the time and they itch like crazy.  I've graduated from simple pumice abrasions to knives, razors and hot irons too. A worrying development. :/

trouble is, I would cheerfully do that every day but I'm shit-scared of losing my job again.  I don't feel like I can go to the disability support people here as that was the start of the downward spiral last time that saw me booted out, an unfair dismissal I didn't have the emotional or financial resources to challenge and still don't.

the crisis access team at my local hospital are all very well but BPD isn't really druggable like common-or-garden depression and there's little they can actually do when I'm in acute crisis like now.

Moving to Cambridge - Part ... whatever I don't care it's finally broken me

I'm in data-analysis hell again today so I thought I'd give my carpal tunnel a rest and do some typing.  Any potential reader of this post might as well be as miserable as me...

Well..

AstraZeneca sure know how to keep us dangling.  STILL no confirmation either way about the move or any time-frame.  It's like they think I can just throw together a new life down south in a couple of days or something...

Consequently my depression and delusional episodes are going off the charts.  Hallucinations, suicidal ideation, self-harming, Valium abuse, all sorts of big fun stuff.  I've made a large seeping wound on my chest with a pumice stone and it really hurts, stupid.

Meanwhile the work on the house has stalled due to a bad patch of multiple flash-flooding towards the end of the recent hot weather, due to blocked street drains emptying into my house and soaking everything.

Ergo everything is still like a bomb-site and it's really breaking me in the head.  Plus I managed to rip my second good Fat-Face shirt in as many months thanks to having to struggle over the piles of crap and it's become completely obvious now that my marriage is a tissue-thin illusion.

I've got to go and see the Psych crisis team tonight after work to look at my meds and probably I'm going to have to endure yet more fruitless months of psychology referrals, because that's how modern Mental Health Services roll, it seems.  Damn you George Osbourne, you posh twat.

I just have to focus on keeping the hissing lit match of madness away from the flammable Draylon that is my job, to coin a bloody awful metaphor.  Watch this space.

In other news, just got back from a family "holiday" in Whitby.  I did enjoy lazing on the beach and fossil hunting with Joshua as usual, he may drive me nuts but he's a really good kid.  Previous to that we went to the cottage in Norfolk again (near Thorpe Abbots).  Not so good as the "wife" had asked her parents along AGAIN so I couldn't relax at all.  Plus I ended up going fishing, which I abhor, with Josh and my Father in Law.  It only served to reinforce my conviction that fishing is a hideously cruel blood-sport, so I'm afraid someone else will have to take him next time.  The WI-FI at the cottage was playing up so we all felt a bit amputated, especially since we really rely on BBC iPlayer these days to keep the kids from killing each other.  One cool thing was going to an aviation museum and seeing a real Gloster Javelin, arguably the very worst jet fighter Britain has ever built, a genuine pilot killer which was obsolete before it even left the ground. A full list of it's many flaws is given by the late, great, much-maligned test pilot Squadron Leader Bill Waterton GM AFC* (1916 – 2006)  is a major part of the excellent book "Empire of the Clouds" by James Hamilton-Patterson (ISBN: 0571247954), which I highly recommend to all those who wonder why we're having to buy in US F-35 fighters for our aircraft carriers and why the RAF flies planes which are 1/3 German.

We also saw a couple of Apache helicopters weaving through the trees one day which was a first for me.  It made me think of how I used to see planes all the time in Northampton, Tornados, F-111's, A-10's, F-15's the works, flying training sorties up the Nene Valley.  The agile grace of the A-10's particularly left an impression upon me, such a contrast with their plug-ugly looks and their mission profile as witnessed later .in Kuwait and Iraq.

This has been a post of two halves, for which I am sorry, but sometimes one just needs to vent.

US Aircraft Carrier CVN-77 should have been another Lexington

As the long-awaited Queen Elizabeth Class of Royal Navy aircraft carriers slowly take shape, with their names steeped in tradition (both names were given to WWII battleships), I have found that the last of the Nimitz Class super-carriers of the US Navy, The USS George HW Bush (CVN-77) was originally touted to have been named USS Lexington, according to US Senate papers.

CVN-77 at Sea

According to Senate concurrent resolution 84 (106th congress, 2nd session), submitted by Democratic Senators John Warner KBE (VA) and Daniel Inouye (HI), veterans of the Korean war and WWII,

respectively, on Feb 24th 2000, the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier CVN-77, then building, should be named "Lexington" since:

• "the name bestowed upon aircraft carrier CVN-77 should embody the American spirit and provide a lasting symbol of the American commitment to freedom"
• "for the citizens of the United States, the name``Lexington'' has been synonymous with defense of freedom from the very first battle of the War of the American Revolution and is taught to American schoolchildren as the place of the ``shot heard round the world'', at which our forebears mustered the courage to gain inde-pendence" 
• "the name ``Lexington'' has been associated with naval aviation from its origins in the 1920s, when President Harding bestowed the name ``Lexington'' on the second aircraft carrier in United States history ... that vessel, the U.S.S. Lexington (CV-2), also known as the ``Fighting Lady'', saw active service from 1927 until lost in 1942 during the historic Battle of the Coral Sea"
• "immediately after that loss, President Franklin D.Roosevelt saw fit to bestow the name ``Lexington'' on a successor aircraft carrier in order to carry on the fighting spirit to preserve freedom"
• Whereas that successor aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Lexington (CV-16), joined the fleet in 1943 and earned 11 battle stars during the Pacific campaigns of World War II as she helped carry the fight to the enemy"
• "U.S.S. Lexington (CV-16) continued her service to the United States after World War II, conducting nu-merous deployments during the Cold War and completing her 48 years of service as a training aircraft carrier for student aviators"
• "upon the completion of her service and in keeping with the traditions of the Navy, the U.S.S. Lexington (CV-16) was stricken from the Navy Vessel Register on November 30, 1991"

The senators continued:
"the aircraft carrier CVN-77 should be named the U.S.S. Lexington:
(1) in order to honor the men and women who served in the Armed Forces of the United States during World War II, and the incalculable number of United States citizens on the home front during that war, who mobilized in the name of freedom, and who are today respectfully referred to as the ``Greatest Generation' and
(2) as a special tribute to the 16,000,000 veterans of the Armed Forces who served on land, sea, and air during World War II, of whom less than 6,000,000 remain alive today, and serve as a lasting symbol of commitment to freedom as they pass on and proudly take their place in history."

In the event, the Navy saw fit to continue the modern trend for naming ships in honour of still-living individuals, in this case WWII carrier aviator and later President George H.W. Bush, rather than after famous and pivotal moments in their history.

This is a shame in my opinion, since it would seem to turn away from tradition, so long the proud backbone of navies world-wide.  At least they're building another "Enterprise".

More on this discussion can be found here: http://www.american.com/archive/2012/march/whats-in-a-name/article_print

Relocation - Part 2

I'm feeling quite gloomy about the move to the Fens today.

As part of our impending relocation to Cambridge we are updating our 1929-built house to better reflect contemporary tastes, which means basically halving the number of internal walls and putting in a cool kitchen.

We had the designer guy from "Betta Living" around last night and he was here for FOUR hours, and it wasn't like we hadn't already decided what we wanted down to the last drawer.  It was exhausting, and it made the move that much more real, which left me with a nasty sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

That's been happening a lot lately, being assailed by unwelcome thoughts about how finite our time here now is.  I was especially struck by it when my son goes to cricket.  He's become quite a regular pick for the Marple CC junior team and one of the coaches was talking about his "future at the club" the other week, which almost had me in tears.  People keep telling me we'll find new Cricket clubs, dance schools etc. at the other end but that's missing the point.  The hopes and dreams I had for my kids now lie in a future that will no longer take place, like another country that it's no longer possible to visit.

Maybe I should just man up and stop feeling sorry for myself but this move is going to be very tough for my kids.

Modern Workplace - we are nothing but abstractions

Going to work is crap.

I hate it.

I have no idea how to do my job properly, it stresses me out and given the choice I'd stay in bed all day watching DVD's and eating biscuits.

And I'm sure I'm not alone.

Going to work has always been crap.  It's like being forced to eat shit.

However, in the modern workplace, going to work is like being forced to eat shit but also being forced to call it chocolate, because in an effort to avoid the appearance that you're nothing but random meat to them, your employers now seek to restrict the very thoughts you have in your head.

Example?  Two years ago I was unlawfully dismissed by my employer for being unable to do my job as it stood,  due to a disability, in direct contravention of the Disability Discrimination Acts 1995 and 2005.  But I was repeatedly bollocked by HR for saying I'd been fired or sacked.  I wasn't being sacked,. I was being "re-deployed", to the DWP benefits office as it turned out.  But it was considered supremely important that at no time did I think that the employer didn't have my best interests at heart.

Even when they're dumping on you from a great height, be it unlawful dismissal, unpaid "promotions", enforced relocation or "re-structuring" in such a way that ten people who have worked together for years as a team suddenly have to fight over nine jobs, you mustn't think you're being treated unfairly, let alone say it.

For a long time I thought it was just a litigation thing.  But then I realised.

We are all just meat.

Underpaid, unvalued, anonymous, expendable meat.

And meat is always better if it goes to the abattoir willingly or unknowingly.

Animal names for tanks

I was reading a book about German armoured vehicles of the WWII era and was struck by the rather whimsical use of animal names, especially cats and insects.  Some, like the Panther and Tiger tanks are well known but some others are more obscure and I shall list them here.  I have not bothered with umlauts, I hope you will forgive me.

For example, other tanks (experimental or unbuilt, by and large) included the Lowe (Lion) heavy tank, the Maus (mouse) super-heavy tank, the Leopard light tank (not to be confused with the contemporary German main battle tank of the same name) and the Wanze (bug) one-man tank.  There were numerous self-propelled guns including the Wespe (wasp), Grille (cricket), Heuschrecke (grasshopper), Elefant, Hornisse/Nashorn (hornet/rhino), Hummel (bumble bee) and Brummbar (grizzly bear).

There was an experimental amphibious vehicle called the Ente (duck), miscellaneous recon/APC vehicles like the Luchs (lynx), Maultier (mule), Puma, Katzchen (kitten), Falke (falcon), Schildkrote (turtle), UHU (eagle owl) and anti-tank or anti-aircraft vehicles like Marder (marten), Gepard (cheetah, again, not to be confused with...) and Coelian (a legendary monster, referring to a converted Panther tank).

Anti-aircraft guns in particular were often given eccentric or dramatically lyrical names:  converted tanks carrying AA guns were known as Mobelwagen (removal vans), while more adavanced AA vehicles became Wirbelwind (whirlwind), Ostwind (east wind) and Kugelblitz (ball lightning).

My absolute favourite name was for a prototype heavy tank destroyer called Sturer Emil, stubborn Emil.

By comparison, the allies in WWII often (but not always) used rather prosaic names if they went beyond simple model numbers at all.   British tanks usually have "C" names like Covenanter, Crusader, Comet, Cromwell, Churchill, and the more modern Centurion, Conqueror, Chieftain and Challenger, although informality and eccentricity did creep in occasionally, tanks converted to APC's were called Kangaroos, Valentine tanks were so named because their design was initiated on 14th February, M7 Priest SP guns were so called because of their pulpit-like machine gun mount, an unofficial ecclesiastical naming system being established which led to later SP guns like Bishop, Sexton and Abbot.  American vehicles were named, unofficially at first and often by export customers, after famous soldiers (mostly generals), Lee, Grant, Stuart, Chaffee, Sherman, Pershing, a tradition continued to this day (Walker, Ridgeway, Patton, Abrams, Bradley, Stryker) and taken up by other countries, e.g. the French LeClerc.

Tanks and armoured vehicles are bad things that are designed to kill people, plain and simple, but some that conceived them had poetry in their souls.

Relocation...part 1

I started this blog out of curiosity but with no clear purpose in mind.  I have hardly ever posted to it.  But now it has a purpose, to document what might just be the darkest hours of my life.

AstraZeneca (those motherfuckers) announced that they're relocating their Alderley Edge R&D operation to Cambridgeshire in 2015, and the BEST CASE is that we'll have to uproot and trek down to East Anglia.

The enormity of this has finally hit me when I was forced to consider how many things, large and small, will have to be sorted out to allow this to happen. I finally sat down and thought about the minutiae that add up to a life and how every single tiny piece has to be uprooted and moved, I finally started to realise what will be lost in the process.

Top of the list, I have to find a job down there.  I'm 47 years old and not exactly transferable.  Sure I know a bit of Python and Java  and I'm working on my Perl but I seriously doubt Sanger or EBI would be interested.  I couldn't even get into Cambridge Uni as a student, when I would have been paying them to be there, so getting a job there is frankly unlikely.  My wife has suggested commuting to Manchester and living here in the week, returning to Cambridge at weekends, but I honestly can't see that working, not least financially.  Maybe if I could've stayed in London rather than moving to the North West and built my career there instead of in this provincial little hole I'd be in a better place about this.  That milk's spilt though, no point crying over it.

We will also have to tear the kids away from the schools, friends, clubs etc.  It's going to be heartbreaking.

We've become deeply embedded where we live, we have friends, hobbies, sports and other activities set up for the kids.  We own a house, have favourite places, our kids took their first steps here and said their first words.  I've never loved where we live but I guess I'd always assumed that we'd be here to see them take their first steps into the wider world, first loves, first triumphs, first failures.  That future has now ceased to exist and I think I might be mourning it.

Now our home is just a house again and it's all down to some corporate bastard's bottom line.  It's hard to get up in the morning because what's the point of going to work when I know I'll never finish what I've started in my job?

I feel robbed, sad, lost, scared.  I feel like I'm suffocating.

I feel like checking out.

Everything life widget...from irritant to obsession

I seem to be steadily accumulating an array of rechargeable battery-powered gadgets.  An ipod, a smartphone, a kindle, a laptop, and on and on.  And on.

This has created a whole new problem, since I suffer from depression and a borderline personality type, and its this:  batteries run down.

Sounds trivial, doesn't it?  But its gradually taking over my life.  As soon as any device comes off mains power, a little "charge-remaining" meter in my head starts cycling downward.  It's making me really quite unhappy.  Some of the other depressed people I know obsessively stockpile food, but I stockpile charge.  I can't stand to watch my family using the laptop on battery power.  I have to plug it in when they're not looking, its like a tic.  Don't they know that the bloody thing will run out of juice, maybe not right away, but eventually.  It's out there, like death, and I think that's the point.

Hoarding tins of beans or constantly charging or even collecting stamps, its just our attempt to hedge against mortality, to rage against the dying of the light, as Dylan Thomas put it, in my case quite literally.

Take me out the ball game: Baseball and the old fat Brit

One of the first things you notice when you look out the window of a plane flying over the USA is that the landscape often seems to be carpeted with baseball diamonds. Everywhere that has people has baseball. But what does a sports-phobic Brit know about this most popular and enduring of American pastimes?

Well, for one thing, like many of us I've seen it crop up in at least a dozen films and T.V. shows, and for another the modern English vernacular is peppered with baseball references: stepping up, hitting a home run, taking a rain check, getting to first base, throwing a curve ball, covering the bases, in the ballpark, I could go on and on.

It is amazingly accessible and deeply appealing to a nerd like your humble blogger. Its history and layers of complexity make for a fascinating and involving life-long hobby without ever needing to watch or play the game if you don't want to. I do like to watch the odd game but it's hard to get to see over here without a costly subscription to MLB.tv and in any case, I already have a favourite game (or games), the 2004 AL East Divisional Pennant clash between the Boston Redsox (go Sox!) and their arch-nemesis, the consistently talented New York Yankees (booooo!).

The way everyman underdogs the Redsox came back from 3 games to nothing down in the fourth of seven games to snatch the pennant at the death in the seventh game must surely have made for the most watchable baseball in recent years. I could no more root for the Yankees than I could support Manchester United, their nearest UK equivalents. No way. Winning all the time is just boring and feels like bad sportsmanship somehow. It somehow feels ingrained that following a team should not be EASY.

There are some parallels with British games like football (NOT SOCCER), for example when Sol Campbell moved from Tottenham Hotspur to their arch-rivals Arsenal he was villified. In a similar vein, when Redsox mainstay Johnny Damon followed in Babe Ruth's footsteps and moved to the Yankees as a free agent, Sox Nation were NOT happy. It will be interesting to see what happens when another 2004 pennant big player David Ortiz is lost to free agency this year, as rumours involving a similar move to the Yanks are already circulating.

Baseball is serious stuff, and indeed the US version of Nick Hornby's anthem to fanatical sports devotion, Fever Pitch, swapped baseball for football. However, at the remove of largely taking place on another continent, baseball appeals even to this fat old sport-hating Brit.

I've been trying very hard to wean myself off printing documents on paper of late, partly to be more environmentally friendly and partly because I've go a bad back. Instead I've been using technology solutions to manage all the documents I have to read, and as a research scientist that means pdf files, above all else.

First, I had to catalogue them. Fir this I tried a paid (though inexpensive) app called PDF Stacks (http://pdfstacks.com/) but I found it quite clunky in it's approach to indexing files using the metadata. In the end I settled on Mendeley, which does much the same job but is free fro entry level users (http://www.mendeley.com/). It also allows connecting with other users in a LindedIn kind of way and also online storage of files and sharing, much as in Cite-U-Like, although the latter is much more labour-intensive. Mendeley is by no means perfect. It's implementaion of bibliography generation is poor as yet and about one in three files catalogued needs some degree of amnual indexing, but this is as likely to be a result of bad metadata as anything else.

How about reading the documents though? Even the best PC display, being backlit, is awful for reading for any length of time because it causes eye strain and also, it's generally in the wrong format (i.e. landscape), unless it supports rotation.

I was eagerly awaiting the launch of the Hearst group's Skiff reader with a metal foil e-ink enhanced display, measuring a whopping 11.5 inches diagonally. Sadly, the developing company got bought out but the tech rights didn't, effectively killing the product at the prototype stage. A good (and at the moment only) alternatives are tablet such as the iPad, Galaxy Tab or Adam, all expensive, heavy and suffering from the backlight problem, or the Amazon Kindle DX. Ok, the latter doesn't do colour and the annotation support in pdf's is non-existent at the moment but the e-ink display is crisp and large enough to view entire pages of A4 pdf's without squinting. the capacity could be larger (it's currently an un-expandable 3.3GB) but apart from that, I love it.

One problem remains however: rationally naming thousands of pdf files without hiring help to do it before you die of old age, so that you can find the paper you want easily. I've tried several products but the one that gives the most consistently predictable and satisfactory results is a-pdf-rename, one of dozens of neat, low cost packages from the eponymous a-pdf company for doing pretty much anything legal you can think of to your pdf's. You can download a trial at http://www.a-pdf.com/rename/, but I guarantee you'll end up more than happy to pay for it at only $27.

I only wish they did mix and match bundles of software because the range of functionality in their products is vast, from scanning documents into PDF format to stripping out images and merging files. If you use PDF's a lot, eventually you WILL end up using one of their products. And quite right too.

Anyhow, back to the paperless office...