Livre d'Or

Well, I managed to finish the December Days meme better than I'd expected! One day I posted late, and then I missed two days right at the end of the month, so I've been behind since then. But I've completed 29 of my 31 prompts. The 30th will be zhelana's request for your favorite moment of the month, which I'll cover today, and I think I'll skip jack's request for talking about board games because I already made a similar post about games and gaming.

( I love my friends )

Anyway, happy new year to all of you! I went to the traditional north Cambridge NYE party, where I drank port and dessert wine with bubbles (that's one very Liv-friendly drink, oh my goodness) and talked to interesting people. We had a fit of productivity just before the party and unpacked my dresses that have been languishing in a case since we moved in, and I thought, why not, and put on a shiny OTT one. I had to make a minor repair to it first, very minor indeed but I had been blocked on it because I'm really intimidated by sewing. So I had a Dress with a tight, slightly rigid, shiny purple bodice that does interesting things for my cleavage, and a big foofy black skirt with several layers of petticoats. It's a bit long to walk in but it garnered me a lot of very pleasing compliments. I wasn't the only one who had dressed up so there were plenty of other pretty people to admire, notably khalinche in a marvellous corset and atreic and emperor in reverse-matched purple and black.

We did the midnight thing, a little half-heartedly in some ways, but there was holding hands in a circle and listening to the radio announcing midnight and playing the recording of Big Ben's bongs, and singing Auld Lang Syne, and drinking fizzy wine, and kissing, even if we did all of those somewhat in a random pile all at once instead of sequentially. I stayed a little while enjoying the party, but not until absurdly late, and walked home admiring the stars and being a little bit tipsily romantic.

This morning I got up about noon, not especially hungover but slightly jetlagged from sleeping 3 am to noon instead of midnight to 8. My wonderful husband made me an elaborate and delicious cooked breakfast while I was still blearily caffeinating myself and browsing bits of Yuletide. So I reckon 2015 has started pretty well!

Still behind, will try to make some brief posts. angelofthenorth asked about Things that make you go hmmm? Which is a lovely question, but I can't quite articulate in general what it is that makes me look at something and feel dubious. I think it's a mixture of things smelling like conspiracy theory, and things where I think group affliation is probably a bigger factor than rigorous analysis. Oh, and any kind of simplistic answers to complex questions, whether medical, social, spiritual or whatever.

( hmmm )

Any others from anyone else? What sorts of things are likely to elicit a skeptical response from you?

[December Days masterpost]

ephemera asked about seasonal music. (And a bunch of other things, but unfortunately I'd filled all my December slots before getting round to those ones.) And I found it an interesting and thought-provoking question, so let's see.

( culture is complicated )

And I suppose there's no reason why I shouldn't listen to carols at other times of year, since I'm not listening for religious reasons anyway. But somehow I like spending the dark days of the year listening to ths particular style of music when it's at least approximately seasonal.

[December Days masterpost]

jack asked about Moar cool science (stuff that's obvious to you as well as stuff that's new to you). So for the old stuff I want to introduce the idea of apoptosis, because that's the thing so cool that it made up my mind I was actually going to study science to high level, when I was dithering about it in my late teens, and I do in fact work on it now. And because when I was babbling about transcription factors I clarified a few points in the comment discussion, and silveradept mentioned I had no idea there was a self-destruct button for cells, so maybe this is something other people also don't know.

And for the new stuff, I know I've been babbling about it already to some people, especially if you were at our Christmas party at the weekend, but I came across a guy recently who is basically making a piece of kit which is very nearly a Star Trek medical tricorder.

( sciiiiiience )

[December Days masterpost]

I did not manage to make a second post yesterday; I'm starting to be in Christmas mode, huddled up with people I care about and I haven't quite worked out how to fit the daily posting into that. With a bit of luck I will manage to catch up after today.

Saturday night I got home in time to be present for most of jack's Christmas party, having had a really flukey journey after leaving the Stoke chanukah party at 5:30 and walking in before 9. It was a lovely party, fairly low key and with lots of people present I really enjoy talking to, including pseudomonas, yay. Then yesterday we didn't really get up until lunchtime, at which point we went to the Carlton to socialize with a small group of friends.

And in the evening I went with cjwatson to a show at the Corn Exchange called Not until we are lost. It's a sort of circus style thing, where they had the audience just milling about in the main space at the CE, and the performers doing essentially trapeze artist tricks on various bits of metal frame scattered through the space. It sounded from the description a bit artsy and pretentious, but it was a really enjoyable show, just for the sheer skill and strength of the artists, swinging from bits of frame and lifting eachother and throwing eachother around and just being gloriously competent and at home in their bodies. There was quite a lot of acting, with the facial expressions of the artists conveying a whole lot of emotion. I'm extremely glad we saw it!

The thing that is wonderful about my life at the moment is being able to spend the longest night cuddled up listening the wind whistling outside. And the sun is coming back, we're about to light seventh candle of chanukah (when friends arrive to join us for the celebration), and it's the new moon of Tevet, so there is going to be more sunlight, and more moonlight, and just generally more brightness and joy.

Anyway, syderia asked me to talk about your favorite pastries. Sorry for being a day late with that! ( om nom nom )

I wish you all light and joy, whatever you're celebrating at the turn of the year!

[December Days masterpost]

A while back, I made a post related to weight loss dieting, and in the comments, shreena asked me why I do believe that politically and scientifically, health at every size and similar approaches are 'better' than weight loss dieting, commenting:

I'm interested in the evidence base on this. I have not looked into it so I don't really have an opinion but I'm interested by the fact that many intelligent knowledgeable friends of mine hold the view that you [...] have expressed but so many health institutions and guidance hold the opposite view (i.e. that health and size are correlated.)

I possibly shouldn't have shoved this in with the December Days prompts, because really I want to put in lots of links to evidence rather than just writing off the cuff as I end up doing when I'm trying to post every day. But equally, I don't want to duplicate the work that lots of other fat acceptance / HAES bloggers have done really comprehensively, so I'm going to try a brief run-down here, and follow up in the new year if this isn't satisfactory.

In order to address this prompt, I am going to talk about weight loss and dieting and also about the medical establishment's attitude to fatness and fat people. My plan is to take this post in a fairly sciencey way, given shreena asked for the evidence base. I have a political opinion, which is strongly body positive and against medical and other discrimination against fat people. But I'm going to try to be as neutral as I can, and I'm going to entertain various possible interpretations of the evidence that I'm discussing. I'm aiming to present a case to intelligent, open-minded skeptics, basically, and I appreciate that even acknowledging the possibility that fatness may cause bad health is going to be offensive or upsetting to some people.

Further, I'm talking purely about the connections between size and health. I am committed to the view that health is not a moral imperative, so even if I saw enough evidence to completely convince me that it's always healthier for everybody to be as thin as possible, I would still argue that people have the right to choose whether they want to go on weight loss diets or not. But that's not the point of this post, I want to explore the question of whether losing weight actually is beneficial to health.

I should also warn about the comment discussion that might come up. I didn't do so last time I discussed this topic, and some of the comments ended up upsetting some friends – I'm very sorry about that. I generally get a lot of pushback when I talk about this sort of topic, because some of my friends are more politically radical than me, and some are convinced by the orthodoxy about fat and health. I hope everybody will be civil and sensitive about discussing a fraught topic, but I expect a fair range of opinions here. I may also not have time to answer comments, partly because it's about to be Christmas and partly because I'm trying to keep up this daily posting for another couple of weeks, given it's been so satisfying up to now.

( wow, that was a lot of disclaimers! )
Does that help? Basically that's where I'm coming from on the issue, scientifically, though my political views do follow on from and extend that. I don't think it's going to be enough to help my brother and his housemate argue against the weight centric approach being applied to care home residents, but it's the best I can manage in an evening.

[December Days masterpost]

angelofthenorth asked me about Art – what do you respond to?

( talking about personal history seems to work well in these posts )

[December Days masterpost]

So sfred asked:

what would your eight Desert Island Discs be? (Optionally, also pick a book and a luxury item.)

I'd been meaning to do DID ever since I saw cosmolinguist's excellent post on the topic, and then I wasn't sure I wanted to do it in December because it's the kind of thing that takes thought to do well. But I'm going to give it a go anyway, it's not going to be as polished as it would be if I hypothetically actually went on the show, but I'll have a go at 8 pieces of music.

( my musical tastes are embarrassingly conventional )

[December Days masterpost]

ewt wanted to know your take on poverty in the UK and elsewhere and what, if anything, you think should be done about it (and by whom).

This is the kind of good question that gets to the heart of where I come from politically. I suppose basically I think some amount of poverty or at least economic inequality is inevitable, if people ever have the freedom to make bad decisions at all. I also think a lot of UK and global poverty right now is being deliberately orchestrated, and what I really want is for the governments of rich countries to stop doing that, which I think would improve things a lot before we get to more positive anti-poverty initiatives.

( I suspect this may annoy my leftier friends and possibly some fellow right-wingers too )

Feel free to tell me why I'm wrong, I am not hugely emotionally attached to these views so I'm happy for this post to trigger a debate!

[December Days masterpost]

ceb asked me, and lots of our mutual friends, What's your favourite museum? It's a really interesting question, because a museum is not the kind of thing most people have a stock favourite, and I've been finding other people's answers really informative.

So anyway, I will consider art galleries separately, because I have a prompt for later on to talk about art. Aside from great art collections well displayed, what I most like in a museum is that it should show me how things work. If I wanted purely factual information, I'd probably rather get it from just reading a book. And I can like collections of physical objects, but they have to be exceptionally curated, just objects with captions ends up feeling like I'm leafing through a catalogue. I mean, I had a soft spot for the old Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford, for precisely the way it was hardly like a museum at all, more like wandering around in the attic of an eccentric hoarder relative. And the new Pitt Rivers is amazing, because it's basically a museum about the kind of awful anthropology museum it used to be, a collection of artefacts, including human remains and sacred objects, that nineteenth century colonialists felt completely entitled to pilfer from anywhere in the world.

But more generally what I like in (non-art) museums is that they have working equipment and explain technology. Needs to be real or realistic replica machines; I don't go to museums to press buttons and watch dated CGI. I especially like the kinds of museums that are built right in the factories or other working places they are about. The north of England is a very good place for museums like that, and we went to some on our honeymoon, near some of the first factories built in the entire world. I also love reconstructed habitations, and I have very fond memories of visiting Sovereign Hill gold mining town near Ballarat in Australia, which demonstrates both how the mining technology worked and how people lived during that era.

If I have to pick just one favourite in this genre, I will go for Verdant works in Dundee. It really does show you clearly how the jute industry worked, including working replica machines (originally used for training engineers IIRC from a visit 10 years ago) which allow you to follow every stage of the process from fibre to fabric. And it explains how people lived in Dundee and the political and economic implications of the jute trade and its decline. I learned there about how a young Churchill was sent to talk down the uppity women's suffragists in a town that had almost total female employment (and almost zero male employment). It's run by enthusiasts, mostly retired people who worked in the jute industry during their working lives, and they're dedicated to detail at the level of scouring Europe for exactly the right kind of early tungsten bulbs so that the illumination would be period-appropriate. I still have my spool of jute thread and my little corner of jute sacking that I watched being made on the machines there, it smells gorgeous, but it's mainly something I just love as a souvenir of my time in Dundee.

So, many thanks for asking an excellent question, ceb!

[December Days masterpost]