CJNBlog

 I have just updated stibasa.org.uk * a little (don't get excited!) as there is still no sign, as far as I know, of anyone willing/able to take on a leadership role wrt cycling in B&D. So what I hand over is what I have put on the www over the years.  This probably won't generate much interest, but I would still like it to be there in case it is useful, so that any successor doesn't have to start from scratch, even if s/he can't hit the ground running based on what I have created. * If the forwarding stops working, use https://stibasa.wordpress.com/

 A friend pointed out that putting the clocks forward in spring empirically saves energy, but the practice still gets me wondering. Let's take the usual 16 hour waking day as read - supposedly typical. Why don't we wake up 8 hours before noon and go to bed 8 hours after, so that our waking day is symmetrical around noon? (For 'noon' I will take solar noon where you are, or mean solar noon where you are, or some coordinates mean solar noon like GMT as appropriate. I'm not quibbling over minutes). Similarly why is the typical working day not symmetrical around noon (8am - 4pm GMT in the UK)? When this proposition is expressed in clock times - get up at 4 in the morning and go to bed at 8 at might it sounds rather silly, but how did this come to be? Why does getting up at 7 and going to bed at 11 sound much more sensible? Why is early or late a feeling about what the clock says? So it seems summer time is a con trick we reasonably willingly / knowingly fall for: We get...

The local government geography of England is constantly under review and changes often, but at any one time it sis still quite bewildering. Here's a bit of a 'tour': At the moment, England comprises 27 two-tier counties, 36 metropolitan districts, 56 unitary authorities, 32 London Boroughs and The City of London. The 56 unitary authorities, which don't come under any county council, have the most complexity. 32 (or 34 if you include Isles of Scilly and Isle of Wight which may have been the names of county councils though it isn't obvious from the name) of them contain no reference to a county in their name (by a county, I mean a a well-recognised county name - a something shire, or something like Essex, or Somerset). The remaining 22 can be categorised as follows, the headings being of my devising; 7 County Councils Cornwall, Durham County, Herefordshire, Northumberland, Rutland, Shropshire and Wiltshire - have recognisable county names.  5 Parts of Counties other t...

It seems quite obvious to me that the "one community" element of this Barking & Dagenham Council epithet for the borough is put there specifically to address the enduring idea that B&D is divided into two parts. In 1965 two former municipal boroughs did merge to form one London Borough (with other minor changes) and in 1980, those who believed that this merger should be reflected in the LB name won out, and The London Borough of Barking became The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham. It is one LB - no question, despite what a few people seem to believe (still), but the two parts idea still persists. I have just seen the draft report of some research I worked on and it is interesting to see the issue touched on by writers who are certainly too young to have any recollection of 1965 and probably too young to have any recollection of 1980. Even so, they are not 'from round here' and would not / could not be expected to grasp the thrust and nuances of this faul...

Passengers on my local train line often complain that the train heating or air conditioning is on when it shouldn't be. They seem to be under the illusion that the driver turns the heating on - presumably as a separate operation. I find this extraordinary. The driver gets into the cab and turns on the heating/aircon according to a guess of how hot it is in the carriages. Just a moment's though shows up why this is not true: 1) The c2c class 357 trains can run in formations of 4, 8 or 12 carriages. How can cab controls  be configured to cope with these different configurations? Can the driver control each carriage individually, or each 4 car unit? Maybe s/he can control each HVAC unit separately - I think there are two per carriage - so that could be 24 units on one train. If s/he can control more than just whole train off or whole train on, how does s/he decide what to do in each case s/he has control over? 2) Given that our home and office HVAC systems are controlled by a time...

It's still reasonably common to see a phone number in writing preceded with "T:" or "Tel:" and an e-mail or web address similarly, though I expect most people know what these things are without the labels. It's never been the case though that postal addresses have been treated like that. They are of course the pre-eminent address for the physical location of buildings - not least because they use place names with which we are familiar. There are I think relatively few examples of places where the settlement the person lives is in a different county to the post town they must include in their address - Thetford is one such place I think. This needn't be a problem insofar as since 1998 it has not been required to include a county name in a postal address. You may include the name of a county though - but should it be the name of the county in which the post town lies or where your house lies? The post town is really the 'town' in which your postal...