On St Stephen’s Day I joined my friends in the Blackheath Morris Men and Fowlers Molly for their traditional Boxing Day tour of Blackheath. This involves dancing outside three local pubs, following which we retire into the third hostelry for a folk music session.

As well as my flute, I took with me a 4/3 camera and two lenses: a 12-60mm, and a so far little used 50-200mm f2.8, giving a maximum focal length of 400mm in terms of 35mm film equivalent. In photographing Morris dancers, my interest is not so much in capturing the group dynamic, but rather to focus in on individuals, their facial expressions and state of motion. Of the 120 or so pictures taken on Monday, only half a dozen show more than three principal figures.

The image included here is of father and daughter Nodge and Jenny Norris dancing a duet which involves bashing each other over the head with tin plates. Now don’t ask me why; the English are a funny lot, with some most peculiar predilections. Still, it was an entertaining sight, and, as you can see, I managed to capture the moment of impact.

I would like to publish more of my photographs, but with this website I do not have sufficient storage space or bandwidth, and am not prepared to use social media sites owing to licensing issues. Until I can find a solution, all I can do is publish the odd highly compressed, low-resolution example. That’s a shame, as the optics used to capture these images are superb, and, in the case of the Boxing Day shoot, I’m very pleased with the results.

While there is near-unanimous agreement among climate scientists that Earth’s average surface temperature has increased from pre-industrial levels, and that human activity is a principal cause of global warming, opinion polling carried out by climate change communications specialist Edward Maibach and colleagues shows that a significant proportion of the general public in the United States believe that scientists widely disagree on the issue. This misperception has a negative influence on the public’s view of the importance of climate policy.

The paper, which is well worth a read if you have access to the journal, discusses some of the challenges involved in popular science communication when it comes to politically sensitive issues such as climate change. It also refers to the rhetorical truth that “…repeating the myth only makes it more familiar over time.” In this context, climate change deniers and sceptics can dominate the debate by virtue of their mainstream media presence, and the relative lack of public access to and understanding of the details of climate science.

That being so, there is at the same time an unwillingness on the part of many to accept what they know is likely to be true, as this conflicts with ideological prejudice. The researchers discuss the effect in terms of “motivated reasoning”, contrasting this with the “Elaboration Likelihood Model”, which they say better explains the views of those not so directly involved in the issue.

According to Maibach and his colleagues, motivated reasoning characterises the minority of “highly committed partisans with strongly held views”, but this doesn’t apply to the population as a whole. That may be so, but can either model account for those intelligent and informed policymakers with a technocratic bent who in this time of global economic crisis choose to downplay the importance of climate change, and instead advocate the kind of energy-intensive growth strategies that got us into this mess in the first place?

Further reading

Ding et al., “Support for climate policy and societal action are linked to perceptions about scientific agreement”, Nature Climate Change 1, 462 (2011)

Überblogger Norman Geras is understandably peeved with a linguistic faux-pas committed by many bloggers and blog followers. This concerns the use of “blogs” to describe both online journals and the textual products of the procrastinatory activity known as blogging.

Let’s get this straight. What you are reading now is a “blog post”, and the section of my website in which it is published a “blog”. The post itself is not a blog, and, as Norm says, the distinction is important. Is that clear? Do you even care? You should do.

As a professional scribbler, what fecks me off is new media consumers who source all their news from blogs and pseudo-blogs referring in online comments to a piece of web-published mainstream media writing as a “post”, and to the author of same as the “OP” (original poster). It’s not the vain attempt to elevate the importance of often inane wibbling, but the likening of journalistic writing to something knocked together in stream-of-consciousness mode by bored office workers hiding behind silly pseudonyms.

That some journalism is crap is beside the point. Journalism is a professional activity carried out in a competitive market environment. Bloggers and blog commenters who write about current affairs are media parasites who can afford to zero-rate their time, and whose lesser efforts contribute to the degradation of journalism as a whole. That could include me, when I’m working outside my particular fields of expertise.

Blogs and blog posts aside, just don’t get me started on the sad illiterates who begin almost every sentence of their uninformed opinions of the latest smartphones and other useless gadgetry with “So…”. I would have them all shot in front of their families.

And now for a spot of Christmas culture…

Video by Francis Sedgemore

A group of hairy, tweedy old farts, most of whom are associated with Morris dance sides in the south east of England, are seen here performing a traditional Mummers play in the Lord Palmerston pub in Carshalton, Surrey, on Tuesday 27 December 2011.

The plays are performed as part of a pub crawl, and this particular well-oiled act was the third in the series. At the end of each performance, the actors pass a hat around the audience, and if they aren’t given enough money, the play is enacted again. Ale drinking is an expensive business.

A study by a student of religious psychology and his medical research colleagues based in Trondheim is said to show that there exists a positive correlation between church attendance and lower blood pressure among those who like to plant their bums on pews. What I would like to know is how this correlation compares with any found among those who sleep in on Sunday mornings for longer than the population average. That would be a useful and obvious experimental control.

I have written before about Avaaz.org. Mostly positive, but also critical of its tendency to political hyperbole. That said, I shall continue to sign Avaaz petitions, and am confident that this form of mass-market, direct democracy has a constructive role to play in civil society.

It doesn’t help, though, to see Avaaz get carried away with itself, and not just on a cloud of environmental hot air. Today, Avaaz has emailed subscribers with yet another self-congratulatory screed extolling its vision of people’s democracy…

“Something big is happening. From Tahrir Square to Wall St., from staggeringly brave Avaaz citizen journalists in Syria to millions of citizens winning campaign after campaign online, democracy is stirring. Not the media-circus, corrupt, vote-every-4-years democracy of the past. Something much, much deeper. Deep within ourselves, we are realizing our own power to build the world we all dream of.

“The march of democracy is sweeping the world, and everywhere it’s rising, Avaaz is there.”

[their emphasis]

Heady stuff, this political march of the penguins, and not even wrong. The “vote-every-4-years democracy” dismissed by Avaaz and its alternative media circus is that of the here and now. It is flawed, as are we all, but representative democracy underpins the freedom and social dynamism of liberal societies. Representative democracy works with and not in opposition to civil society, and both are required for the efficient and just management of a complex and populous society.

Back in the real world, I see that Chinese democrat Chen Wei has just been sentenced to nine years in prison for “subversion of state power”. Chen is reported to have told the court in Suining that “democracy will prevail” in China. That sounds to me like a statement of faith rather than evidence-based politics, but it is a faith I share, if only because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate. In the meantime, champions of democracy such as Avaaz would do well to focus their efforts on real-world problems and solutions. Mr Chen could do with a helping hand.

Anyone who watches the output of British chat show host Jonathan Ross needs their head examining, but so too would any artist who turned down the opportunity to appear on one of the gobby shite’s insanely popular television programmes. The insanely talented musical comedian and evangelical atheist Tim Minchin didn’t, but his specially commissioned song about a first century Jewish heretic was recorded and editorially spiked prior to its scheduled broadcast.

This is excellent news for Mr Minchin, who will surely reap more career-enhancing publicity from this act of crass censorship by ITV controller Peter Fincham than he would have gained from the airing of a mildly amusing and irreverent ditty that looks now to be going viral.

Cheers, Peter, and a Merry Mithrasmas to you and yours!

Hat tip: Natalie Haynes

Wishing readers a happy winter solstice and a profligate new year.

Have fun, spend your savings, and cash in your pensions. For they are worth diddly squit in hands of politicians, bankers and investors.

NB: standard disclaimers apply on all advice provided by Sedgemore Consultancy Services.

An old Jew tells a joke, brought to you by an old Notajew…

Hat tip: Shaun Downey

Sorry, couldn’t resist… I’ll get my coat.