I'm in Essex, covered in nettle stings and drinking Strongbow.

Dogford.

2008-09-18T22:35:26Z

Still very behind on LiveJournal.

I asked uon where I should explore tomorrow, and when I turned down Catford he said I should find a Dogford and go there.

I gathered some preliminary suggestions on IRC, and I now turn to LiveJournal to make the final decision. You can choose as many options as you like, but I'm only going to go to one of them, so ticking all the boxes is equivalent to ticking none of them. Isle of Dogs is intentionally omitted as I've been there quite a lot recently.

Please also feel free to suggest things to do in any or all of these locales. I like lunch, dinner, pubs, bookshops, and green stuff.

Edited to add: This is actually happening on Sunday or next week instead, so you can still vote. I'll close the poll tomorrow morning.

View Poll: #1262571

International Blog Against Racism Week.

2008-08-12T01:44:43Z

ibarw was last week. I'm a bit late, sorry. Here is how my week was, as a white woman.

On Monday 4 August 2008, I got annoyed with the part-Chinese person who said "X doesn't offend me" rather than with the white person who took this as licence to do All X All The Time.
On Tuesday 5 August 2008, I got irritated by some of my neighbours having a conversation outside my kitchen window in a language I didn't understand.
On Wednesday 6 August 2008, I held my phone tighter when a young black man walked past me as I stood texting in broad daylight on the pavement of Plaistow High Street.
On Thursday 7 August 2008, I had doubts about a woman's mental capacity because she had a strong accent.
On Friday 8 August 2008, I used deliberately convoluted language in an email to a non-native English speaker, because I wanted her to see me as an expert in the (non-linguistic) field we were discussing.

This is not intended as a confessional post, nor as a self-congratulatory "look at me, my racism is so incredibly mild" post. I will admit that it was prompted by reading a number of IBARW posts that I felt were rather naive; and I've had a few arguments with myself about whether I should post this, given that there's part of my brain going "yay Kake, go Kake, you show those people what anti-racism is actually about these days", and I can't make it shut up. (But the "post it and see" part won in the end.)

Anyway. One barrier to an honest and productive discussion about racism between white people in the UK is that we think the mere mention of race is a sign of racism. We shy away from describing someone as black; we think colourblindness is something to strive for; we jump at every opportunity to minimise the differences between our white selves and someone else's non-white self; we try to pretend, in effect, that everyone is white under the skin.

There is a difference, in the UK, between growing up as someone who's coded as white and growing up as someone who's not coded as white. In some places this is a less explicit difference — perhaps the sole non-white kid in the school might get treated like everyone else except when it comes to being seen as a potential boyfriend/girlfriend — while in others it's more explicit — for example a more "diverse" school where hanging out with people outside your socially-constructed racial group is seen as weird and deviant.

While one "answer" to this problem is to smush everyone down into a single homogeneous culture, there is the slight problem (as implied above re colourblindness, and as seen also with gender issues) that "why don't we all forget our differences" generally boils down to "why don't we all act white" ("and male").

That's a bit of a sidetrack, though — and an illustration of, rather than progress towards, where my point was initially going.

When I talk about racism, I'm not talking about an individual character defect. I'm not talking about my grandfather's pride at soldiering for the British Army in India. I'm not talking about the stereotypical twentysomething fishbelly-white East End BNP skinhead.

I'm talking about the system that we all live in, and the benefits that this system extends to those of us who happen to be coded white — whether we want them or not. When you're seen as white, then you have white privilege. When you're seen as male, then you have male privilege. When you're seen as heterosexual, then you have het privilege.

None of this is under your control; the only control you have is (a) changing your appearance or (b) changing the system.

How to make women feel welcome at the GBBF.

2008-08-11T15:03:42Z

Good work there, CAMRA.

Moo/photos/RGL pointer.

2008-07-14T11:09:07Z

I've just posted a request for photo help (you don't have to take them yourself) to rglondon.

(This post doubles as a reminder that if you're interested in London and/or RGL, you may be interested in rglondon.)

Book swap reminder.

2008-07-13T23:32:38Z

Book swap at our house, this Wednesday (16 July) from 7pm until 10pm.

Bring books you don’t want any more, and take away books that other people don’t want any more. It's fine to take books without bringing any, and it's fine to bring books without taking any. It's also fine to take books in order to dispose of them in some other way, e.g. the 56a Infoshop. I will be Freecycling any leftovers.

There will be food; it will be buffet-style, enough to be your dinner, and it will be available throughout the evening. Vegans will be catered for by default, and other dietary restrictions on request.

Kaiseki at Saki, October 2007.

2008-06-25T20:57:28Z

(I'm shunting this over from the RGL entry because I want to cut the existing text on the entry down a bit in order to add info about a subsequent visit. Apologies to those who've already read it.)

Saki is probably one of my top five — maybe even my top three — London restaurants at the moment.

Situated just across the road from Smithfield Market, it's perhaps not in the most obvious part of town for fine dining; but it's worth the trip.

My first visit was on a Wednesday evening in October 2007; I dragged uon along with me, having booked two places at the sushi counter. There were a few people dining at the smaller tables, and another couple joined us at the counter a little later on. We had the six-course kaiseki with matched wines and sakes. The wine pairing was perhaps a mistake; it wasn't paced particularly well, with too much alcohol at the start of the meal and not enough at the end.

The food was very good though.

The first course was half-cooked lobster with mizuna in a tasty sesame sauce. I do like the half-cooked (mi-cuit) style for fish.

We were both very keen on the second course of seared salmon slices wrapped around marinaded raw onion and served with a thin green chilli sauce. Looking back, this dish is comparable to the yellowtail sashimi with green chilli salsa that rjw1 and I recently had at Dinings. I would like to eat more sashimi in this style.

Tempura was third; I am never very excited by tempura, so I'm not the right person to comment on this course. I had absolutely no complaints about it though; the batter was hot, crisp, not greasy, and not tough.

Salmon teriyaki followed this; the sushi chef said we could have rice with this if we wanted, but he didn't recommend this since the sushi course was next, and so we followed his advice. He was right.

The fifth course comprised chutoro, yellowtail, and prawn nigiri, and inside-out rolls with shiso leaf. We were positively encouraged to eat the nigiri with our hands; the waitstaff brought round warm handwipes in advance, and the chef recommended we use fingers instead of chopsticks. The rice portions on the nigiri were smaller than I've had anywhere else, which I was pleased about in the context of the multi-course meal, and the fish portion was in proportion to the rice.

The final course was ice cream (green tea flavour, I think), and a small portion of cake, which doop was very pleased with. (I'm not a dessert person, but he is, so if he likes it then it's good.)

Service was patchy and sometimes slightly awkward. One of my wine glasses was removed before I'd finished drinking from it, and doop's dessert plate was whipped away just as I was about to transfer my portion of cake to it. Overall, I did feel as though we were rushed through the meal slightly. (Note: these issues were not at all in evidence on our latest visit, earlier this month.)

The sushi chef was very chatty and friendly, and sitting at the sushi counter was definitely a good choice. In fact, he remembered us when we visited nine months later, accompanied by julietk, for the vegan kaiseki which I will post about shortly. I'm always surprised when someone recognises me! Though I have a feeling that when they do, it's because I was the scruffiest person who ever entered their restaurant — this would explain why it never happens in pubs :)

View Poll: #1211036

Book swap date decision.

2008-06-25T20:14:56Z

Next book swap will be on Wednesday 16 July (venue, time, etc, at that link). Apologies to those who won't be able to make it. Please let me know if you plan to come, and you have a dietary restriction/preference that isn't covered by the union of "vegan" and "plenty of meat".

There will be reminders closer to the time.

Book swap!

2008-06-21T21:03:25Z

Time for another book swap. Please vote for your preferred dates in the poll below. Venue and time remain unchanged: our house, 7pm-10pm.

Standard blurb: You know bring and buy sales? Where you bring stuff you don’t want, and you buy stuff that other people don’t want, and the money goes to some good cause or other? Well, this is a bit like that, except without the money. Bring books you don’t want any more, and take away books that other people don’t want any more but you do. It's fine to take books away without bringing any, and it's fine to bring books without taking any away. There will be food; it will be buffet-style, enough to be your dinner, and it will be available throughout the evening. Vegans will be catered for by default, and other dietary restrictions on request (requesting is good; I like culinary challenges).

View Poll: #1208644

Swedish names.

2008-06-16T12:24:14Z

Are colons really allowed in Swedish names? Or is this some kind of typographical compromise?

Edited to add: Ah, apparently "Ax:son" is an abbreviation of "Axelsson". I've seen Swedish speakers use the colon to indicate missing letters before, so I should have thought of that.

OpenGuides meet reminder.

2008-06-16T09:58:38Z

OpenGuides meet in Oxford this Saturday.

London Library.

2008-06-12T11:29:28Z

Hello. Are any of you members of the London Library? If so, then her_welshness would like to interview you for her dissertation.

Wanted — someone to do some web stuff.

2008-05-18T16:27:51Z

The OpenGuides website needs an overhaul, and I've been blocking on it for so long that I decided it was time to try and throw some money at the problem. Not a lot of money, because it's coming out of my pocket; I was thinking of about £50, so obviously we need someone who'll do it at mates' rates rather than market rates.

The problem with the current site is that it's too hard to update (as you can see from the date of the "Latest project news"...) It's overcomplicated, for one thing, and it assumes that it lives at the server root, so it's a pain in the ass to check out, modify, and test. What we'd like is for someone to rewrite it using nothing other than HTML and SSI; no Perl, no PHP, etc.

Other requirements:

No duplication anywhere; menus, footer, navbar, etc should be defined exactly once and then included with SSI where required.
It should always be possible to check the site out of svn and amend and test it without it necessarily being at the document root.
Any design/appearance stuff should be done with CSS, and the CSS classes should be compatible with those used by OpenGuides itself so when we start shipping a default CSS file with the OpenGuides distribution we can have a consistent look with the OpenGuides website.

The svn repo for the current site is at http://dev.openguides.org/browser/website.

Note: I'm not looking for someone to work on the OpenGuides application (well, I'm always looking for new OpenGuides developers, but that's not what this post is about). I'm looking for someone to overhaul the website at http://openguides.org/ which describes what OpenGuides is about, links to the various Guides, and has project news etc.

Anyone interested?

London Crawling, 10 May 2008 — itinerary.

2008-05-08T12:28:21Z

The itinerary for the fibromyalgia pub crawl on Saturday is now available here on juliann's journal. We're starting near Westminster at 5:30pm and will then walk along the river with a few diversions and additional pub stops. The total length of the walk will be around 5km (about 3 miles) and the pace will be very leisurely. Please do come and join us if you're free and fancy a nice wander and some beer. Juliann will be accepting donations for a fibro charity but there won't be any nagging.

Kaiseki at Umu, April 2008.

2008-04-27T20:40:10Z

I wasn't quite sure where to put this, because the RGL review already has more than enough words in it, but I made notes afterwards and I don't just want to throw them away, so they are here.

Anyway; Umu is a Michelin-starred Japanese restaurant in Mayfair, and Bob and I went there for dinner last Monday. We had the special sushi kaiseki menu with matched sake. It was very good but not perfect.

First seasonal appetiser was kudzu "tofu" topped with uni, wasabi, and what I think was probably shredded young ginger. It was served with a sauce of green peas and spinach chlorophyll. The tofu had some rather unpleasantly chalky green peas in it.

Second seasonal appetiser had three components: baby squid served with rape flowers and white miso sauce; mochi stuffed with white miso and white kidney beans and wrapped in an oak leaf; and some highly seasoned sushi rice with a thin slice of seabass, again wrapped in a leaf. I really liked the rape flowers; I'm not sure if this was because of their intrinsic flavour or because of the flavour of their simmering liquid. I thought the mochi was too sweet for this stage of the meal.

Next came sashimi: amberjack, chutoro, and langoustine.

Fourth course was a clear soup with langoustine, "butterbar" (I have no idea if this was plant or animal — I really couldn't tell), and shiitake mushroom. Excellent stock used in this.

Traditional sushi was next: I can't remember what we had though. Three pieces.

The traditional sushi was followed by modern sushi: something (tuna?) with pesto, seared amberjack, toro. The seared amberjack was excellent; I like this fish anyway, but just that light cooking on the outside really improved the flavour. This was served with miso soup containing some confusing toruses — egg? tofu? squid? Who knows.

The penultimate course was a piece of sea bass which had been crisped on the base as well as the skin, which worked very well. It was very very very very slightly overcooked except in the middle, but I suspect this may be unavoidable in this preparation. Lotus root and bamboo shoot with this.

Dessert was very dull; a grapefruit half with the segments only partially severed, topped with a rather uninteresting brandy jelly and a coconut and pineapple sake sorbet. We also got some rather uninteresting chocolate marshmallow cubes afterwards.

London Crawling, 10 May 2008.

2008-04-18T19:44:25Z

The National Fibromyalgia Association of the US is hosting a walk to raise funds and awareness on 10 May this year. juliann is organising a London version on the same day. Here's the blurb:

London Crawling is a pub crawl through the West End of London on the evening of Saturday 10 May 2008. We're going to walk our 5km (hopefully, fingers crossed!) but take regular breaks to sit down, rest and perhaps have a half. (Alcohol not required, indeed not recommended for many on certain pain medications!) It's social but socially conscious all in one! We'll also be pointing out things which are hazards to the mobility impaired along our route, for those who have never had cause to notice such things before.

I will be going along! If you are in London, will you come too? You can either be an official Virtual Participant[0], which costs $35 (join and pay here), or you can just come along and hang out with us and maybe make a donation.

[0] Virtual since we're not in California, where the main walk is happening.

Further details, and a link for making online donations, are on Juliann's journal (she's organising this, not me). Exact details of the route will emerge at some future point, once there has been research into suitably-accessible pubs in the area.

A-Z walk, the fifth.

2008-03-23T03:41:35Z

Page 26 column K (Chingford Station) to page 37 column K (Chigwell Station).

So after an enormous break of over three months, I resumed the A-Z walks on Monday 17 March 2008. (One major reason for the hiatus was that I'd been doing a different kind of exploring — visiting a particular area and wandering around circularly rather than linearly. I did e.g. Brockley, Sydenham, and Ilford.) caramel_betty happened to have some leave days that needed taking, so he joined me on this one. This wasn't a "real" A-Z walk, but rather a "fill in" one to get me from the eastern edge of the top row to the eastern edge of the next row down.

We started out eastwards from Chingford Station, making a brief diversion to have a look at Queen Elizabeth's hunting lodge. This diversion set the tone for the rest of the first half of the walk; mud, mud, and more mud. We squelched our way along the edge of Chingford Plain, circled around where we thought the lodge was, then headed back roughly the way we'd come, separated from the lodge by a tall fence which resisted all attempts at peeking through. We eventually identified the lodge with the help of a sign; it turned out to be smaller and rather less impressive than one might expect, and completely dwarfed by the Harvester (?) pub next door.

What should have happened next was a nice stroll through some woodland to the Warren Wood pub. It seemed quite easy, especially as there's yet another section of the London Loop which should have led us right to it. Unfortunately we managed to end up heading in completely the wrong direction, and after a good deal more mud ended up pretty much due south of where we'd entered the woods, instead of due east. Personally, I blame the fact that it was too overcast to see the sun, and there were no satellite dishes handy, so I had no idea where south was. I promise to buy a compass at some point.

Anyway; we eventually stumbled on a landmark in the form of a lovely, lovely road sign. I looked it up on the map, cursed silently, apologised to caramel_betty, and led the way onwards to Buckhurst Hill, where my intention was to have a pint and some lunch in the Three Colts. It was, of course, closed. Plus it was about to rain.

Interweb-on-mobile-phone was employed, and we decided on a plan B of Rocky's, which sounded kind of awful but would at least provide shelter from the rain, and it was just down the road. Upon arrival, we learned that Rocky's had been renamed to the Players Lounge. This disturbed me somewhat, as it honestly did sound and look like it was some kind of swingers' club. Now I have nothing against swingers, but I did worry that it might be, well, rude to walk into a swingers' club with unbrushed hair, scruffy clothes, and mud up to one's armpits. Thankfully I was completely imagining everything. It was a perfectly fine place to drink, with surprisingly good service, and they even had Hoegaarden. (I do have a strong suspicion that it's the kind of place that's utterly, utterly grim in the evenings, mind.)

Rain evaded, Hoegaarden quaffed, and lunch eaten, we headed out again with renewed energy. Skipping blithely across the M11 (and past a minor car smash), we peeled off north onto Roding Lane. This proved to be a mistake, as the pavement ran out very quickly, meaning we had to walk on the road. As previously documented, I know how to walk safely on roads, but that doesn't mean I like it — and checking the map later revealed that had we continued along Chigwell Rise we could have rejoined the London Loop and walked along an actual footpath. Oh well.

At the end of Roding Lane we passed Chigwell School, noting in passing that while in my day kids used to hang around the edges of the school grounds to smoke a sneaky cigarette and actually have conversations, these days they seem more interested in sending text messages and ignoring everyone around them. So exactly like grown-ups in pubs, then.

Just past the school was Ye Olde Kings Head, an enormous Chef and Brewer pub where we had a couple of pints of Bombardier. This is the point at which my earlier warning to caramel_betty began to become true — after a certain point, every A-Z walk turns into a pub crawl. The Kings Head was followed by the King William IV (Timothy Taylor Landlord and a couple of decent enough pizzas), and then, for some reason, the King Edward VII in Stratford. I have no idea which of us decided that we should go drinking in Stratford, but it was an excellent decision. Despite a bit of wobbling on my part when we failed to immediately discover the pub, and memories of mstevens' stories of Stratford muggings began to resurface, the King Eddie turned out to be a hidden gem, a saving grace, an excellent way to round off the day. A pint of Nelson's Trafalgar, a pleasant and spacious seating area, and some interesting music just on the right side of "too loud" — and a food menu that looked plenty interesting enough to merit a return visit at some point.

See also: Google map of our route (no Flickr photoset as I only took photos of pubs, and you can see them by following the RGL links).

Next up: Chigwell Station westwards, probably ending up at Highams Park Station.

Cooling the Tube.

2008-03-12T11:46:01Z

Hello. I went to a talk last night about cooling the London Underground. It was interesting. I took notes, and have written them up. This isn't in the exact order the talk was in; I moved some stuff around to make more sense (the speaker mentioned that his slides weren't in the optimal order, so his talk wouldn't be either).

The talk was at the Building Centre in Bloomsbury, and the speaker was the director of TfL's Cooling The Tube programme, Kevin Payne.

When an underground train tunnel is first constructed, it's at the native soil temperature of around 14°C. Temperature problems start to show up 20–30 years later; this timescale has been seen over and over again in different lines/metro systems throughout the world. Basically the tunnel is a closed environment with a lot of energy sources. The soil around the tunnel gradually dries out and becomes a much better insulator — they've measured this on the Victoria line and found that the soil is dried out for several metres' distance from the tunnel.

The subsurface lines (e.g. Circle, Hammerchapel) are relatively well ventilated, so conventional aircon can be used there — in fact, trains with aircon are being brought into service next year. The deep lines are the problem. There's very little free air as the tunnel sizes are so constrained; also, many of them were built without adequate ventilation — the Jubilee Line is the best of the bunch as it was built later, with the benefit of hindsight.

Aircon (really, air cooling) basically works by moving heat from one place to another. The reason conventional aircon is unsuitable for use on the deep line trains is that while moving heat from the inside of the train to the outside of the train is all well and good when the train is moving, it actually makes things worse when the train is at a standstill; there's nowhere for the heat to go and so the temperature in the tunnel increases and increases to the point where the aircon has to cut out. The conditions inside the train then become intolerable much faster than if there had been no aircon in the first place (they've tested this; he didn't give details of how).

Temperature isn't actually the only factor in play here; the others are exposure time, air movement, and humidity. Humans have a fairly narrow tolerance range — optimal conditions are around 24–26°C, 1.5m/s airflow, and 30–45% relative humidity. Currently, we can only really control exposure time. Humidity isn't an enormous problem because the network is actually fairly dry; relative humidity in the tunnels is already around 35–45%. (This does cause some difficulties in other technical/operational aspects — but it's not a problem in terms of comfort.)

Climate change isn't a huge factor driving heat increases in the deep-level lines; the increase in passenger journeys is more important. The overall trend is ever upwards; although certain economic events may stall the increase for a while (not sure what these are — there was one around 1992–1994ish and another one a bit later), it never goes backwards. 3 million journeys per day used to be a "very busy" day — in December 2007 we hit a max of 3.9 million and a month later a max of 4.1 million.

(As an aside, we were also shown a graph of temperatures on the Northern Line between Chalk Farm and Hampstead; while the outside temperature spiked up and down during day and night, the temperature in the tunnel barely varied at all. Indeed at some points the outside temperature was higher than the tunnel temperature — a high outside temperature would have to persist for quite some time before the tunnel temperature would start to rise.)

London's special climate plays a part too; compared to the rest of the UK we're what's known as a "heat island" (see this PDF of an essay on the topic). The many dark surfaces along with all the bricks, mortar, and steel soak up heat to the point where London's temperature may be up to 6°C higher than that of the surrounding more rural areas.

Various cooling schemes have been thought up, and a number of them are in deployment or trialling at the moment.

Although the conventional aircon method of moving heat from the train to the tunnel is a net loss, there's no harm in using natural ventilation for this; that is, methods that don't involve adding energy to the system. This has been tested on one Central Line train — these trains have rather large windows, so they replaced this with a smaller window plus a natural ventilation, er, thingy, above the window. This simple idea was very successful — it's no good in a stalled train, but it does help a lot when the train is moving.

Groundwater cooling makes use of water in the ground surrounding the underground part of a station. It's currently being trialled at Victoria Station; this is a suitable site because the station gets a fair bit of seepage (much of it from the River Tyburn). The groundwater's collected in a sump; it comes in at around 16–17°C and is then circulated through heat exchangers (which work by blowing warm air across coils of cold water pipes). Once the water is warm, it's returned to the external environment via the sewers. The environmental impact is tiny. This trial is on a fairly small scale — he mentioned a figure of 60 kW — but it's working well so they plan to increase the cooling power as part of the overall upgrade of Victoria Station.

They'd love to be able to do this on the entire network, but they're constrained by the lack of reliable and decent quality sump water — they expect to be able to do it at three or four more sites at most. They've looked at lots of sites and found that the groundwater is very polluted at some of them; and although the cooling system is a closed one, there's always the chance of leaks, and they just don't want to risk pumping polluted water around so close to people.

Other things currently being deployed in stations are fans and chillers (i.e. fairly conventional aircon, the kind which wouldn't work in tunnels). There's a large fan installed in Oxford Circus ticket hall, and there'll be one at Euston soon and one at Waterloo "at some point". There are also a number of portable fans (the ones in cages) which can be used as an interim measure; they're getting more of these (and also getting "nicer cages").

Another option for cooling the tunnels is mid-tunnel ventilation shafts, which work by a combination of fans in the shafts and the "piston" effect of a train in a tunnel pushing a plug of air ahead of it. There are lots of these already, built 20–50 years ago and hidden all over London. Some of them are quite interesting, architecturally. There's a "temple"-style one (built in 1968) for the Victoria Line in a landscaped garden in North London; the design of the surface part of the shaft was inspired by the garden. There's also a row of Georgian houses in Pimlico where one of the houses is actually the surface part of a ventilation shaft.

These shafts are currently being upgraded to roughly double the previous amount of airflow; the Victoria Line ones are first (there are fourteen of them plus two others that are actually on the Piccadilly Line but are used to cool the Victoria Line — don't understand this bit).

As well as the stuff in deployment/trialling, there's also a fair bit of new technology in the research or testing stage.

In-train hybrid cooling might be the Great Solution, but it's still at the experimental stage. Basically, conventional aircon is used when the train is above the surface, and switched off when the train goes underground. The clever part is that when above the surface, the aircon is used not only to cool the train but also to build up a reservoir of cooled material which is then exploited when underground. They put a lot of effort into looking for a suitable medium for this — they tried all kinds of exotic substances, some of which were too toxic, or too flammable, or had unsuitable melting or freezing points. In the end, they settled on water — you may have heard things in the news about "Ken's mad plan to put blocks of ice on Tube trains" — well, it's true, and this is it. (The ice unit will be under the floors of the carriages.)

This is a fairly radical idea as it's not (to their knowledge) been done before; although ice has been used to cool trains for over a century in various parts of the world, this is the first system that actually creates the ice on board the train. (As an aside, it turns out that freezing and thawing ice is quite an interesting problem in itself — you don't want ice to accumulate around the pipes when making your reservoir, nor do you want water to accumulate around the pipes when melting your reservoir; it's vital that as much material as possible crosses the phase boundary as this increases the amount of energy stored/released.) Hybrid cooling is currently at the mockup testing stage.

Another option is regenerative braking. Instead of braking conventionally, using friction (which creates waste heat), you brake by switching your motor to a generator/alternator, thus creating electricity instead of heat. The Central, Northern, and Jubilee Lines already have this. There's still some tweaking to be done, adjusting the acceleration and deceleration cycles to optimise the system, but basically railways are way ahead of other forms of transport on this.

Adiabatic and wet evaporative cooling are due to be trialled this year. (Adiabatic cooling works by blowing air through a fine water mist; it's a very ancient technology.) They're not sure these are right for London since they're most effective in arid conditions. The Madrid metro is already using this technology.

As already mentioned, although groundwater cooling is quite fantastic, it's unsuitable for all but a very few sites. A related idea uses boreholes to exploit the water in the aquifer below London; the water enters the system at around 12–13°C, is used for cooling, and is then reinjected into the aquifer at a suitable distance from the source point. This has already been successfully deployed at the Royal Festival Hall. There are around ten sites on the Tube network that are suitable for this — the main problem is finding suitable places to site the boreholes. I don't entirely understand why this is, since he also said that when the borehole is complete the external footprint is of the order of a manhole cover. Anyway, they should have one of these working within five years, and hopefully much sooner.

Another thing in testing at the moment is aimed at tackling the space aspect of the problem — cooling technology is all very well but you need somewhere to put it. These are air handling units (water/air heat exchangers) shaped in cross-section like a circular segment, and installed in the ceilings above platforms. This idea was inspired by the passenger overbridges which you can see on some platforms (you know when you're on the platform and if you look up you can see people's feet walking overhead? Those. You can see them at e.g. Paddington, Waterloo, Holborn, Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus) There's a mockup install at Aldwych (a disused station) and there'll be another installed at a disused platform at Charing Cross later this year. Once they've got the installation process streamlined, they'll be doing a live trial at one of the Victoria Line stations — because access time for maintenance work is very precious, they want to make absolutely sure they can get the thing installed as fast as possible to avoid too much disruption to passenger service.

Under-platform exhausts are also in development — simply removing heat from under the train (where a surprising amount of it accumulates) while the train is in the platform. These are "almost certain" to be deployed, but he wouldn't commit to which stations will get it first.

The ideas above are all basically about minimising waste heat, and transferring it out of the system. The next stage of the challenge is to find a use for all this energy, rather than just throwing it all away. One possibility is warm water preheating — although there will never be enough power to heat water to the point where you can have a bath in it, preheating with waste heat can at least reduce the amount of energy input needed for the domestic/business hot water supply. Heating for building environments is also a possibility. Something along these lines is currently being trialled in Stockholm, Sweden, where a new office block alongside Central Station will be heated using (in part) waste heat from the station.

At the moment, in London, energy prices are just slightly too low and the technological problems slightly too difficult for us to have tipped over into using our waste heat in this way. He ended the talk by saying that he is very open to the idea, though, and he would love it if someone would come to him and say "hey, I have this building, can I have some of your heat?" — though nobody has, yet.

I have already spent way too much time on this, but I may come back later and add some supplementary links/explanations (or perhaps the other Tube obsessives and/or the engineers on my friends list will do it for me). Also, I took some photos of the Building Centre's scale model of Central London, but I haven't had a chance to sort them out yet. Edit: here they are.

Wanted — PHP people (not a job ad, sorry)

2008-02-04T01:35:54Z

Hello. I recently met the chap who runs Last Rounds, a London pub review site which focuses on giving information about pub opening hours, the location and opening times of nearby public toilets, and first/last departure times for nearby public transport.

He is a very nice person (and was really enthusiastic about RGL, which was pleasing). He has lots of ideas for what he wants to do with his site, but he's not actually a programmer. I said I'd ask around for people who might be interested in helping him out. The site runs on a content management system called Joomla, which is written in PHP.

Factors which may sway your decision:
» There's no money involved for you; this is not his job, but a hobby site. (He does make a very small amount of money from a text messaging service associated with the site.)
» The content on the site is All Rights Reserved rather than Creative Commons (I haven't actually asked him if he'd consider changing this).

Anyone?

Not my photographs.

2007-12-11T23:57:14Z

One of my Flickr friends has a favourite tree.

Best TV series ever — the polls.

2007-12-04T16:38:25Z

Here are the polls for this, a few days late (sorry).

You can vote in both polls. In the first, you get to pick one. In the second, please pick no more than three. I can't make you not pick more than three, but please don't. You're voting on "the best TV series ever!" — whatever that means to you.

Note: the second poll isn't some kind of "best runners up". It's the same question as the first — what's the best TV series ever?

If you think "best series ever" is meaningless in the context of being allowed to vote for more than one thing, then ignore the second poll. If you think it's impossible to choose just one, then ignore the first poll. (I have provided a tickybox for anyone who has a complaint about the methodology of this poll. Please confine any such complaints to this tickybox.)

View Poll: Best TV series ever?

A-Z walk, the fourth.

2007-12-01T18:56:31Z

Page 25 column F (Ponders End Station) to page 26 column K (Chingford Station, give or take).

It turned out that much of this was actually on the London Loop. Again.

My plan had been to walk around King George's Reservoir until I ran out of footpath. The walk along the reservoir was quite pleasant; there were trees and swans and amusing signs. However, when I rounded the top and prepared to walk back down the eastern edge, I found that the footpath that was clearly marked on my A-Z was blocked off with hazard tape. However! There was a very clear gravel path leading off vaguely northeastwards, and a sign proclaiming it to be the way to Chingford Station — three miles, which sounded about right. It all got rather organised-looking at this point; not just the nice gravel path, but benches every fifty yards and even picnic tables. This, it seems, was the bottom edge of Lea Valley Park.

About 500 m later, I reached Sewardstone Road. This was the part I hadn't been looking forward to, since it was basically a long trek down a main-ish road, and Google's satellite images had suggested that there wasn't much pavement involved. (My previous footpath plans would have had me coming out onto this road about a kilometre further south than I actually did.) I was momentarily cheered by seeing a sign for "Freddie's Free House", but it turned out that this was in fact an ex-pub, not a pub. I did see a foreign bus, though, and what seemed to be some kind of llama petting zoo. And of course ended up in a pub.

Flickr photoset.

Next up: I've actually finished the top row now, but I'm going to try to keep a continuous line, so I'm walking off-map from Chingford Station around to Chigwell Station. I had to purchase an extra map (from Stanfords) — it was very exciting.

A-Z walk, the third.

2007-11-17T03:45:37Z

Page 23 column K (Enfield Town Station) to page 25 column F (Ponders End Station).

I have to admit that this one was pretty much just a pub crawl. caramel_betty, my expert on the area, had warned me that it would be "fairly uneventful", so I decided to just pick a few reasonable-looking pubs from RGL and BitE and treat it as a beer-spotting expedition.

The eastern part of Enfield seems to be less McMullen-dense than parts further west; unfortunately this didn't mean more of a variety of real ale, but rather none at all. The Southbury at least had real Greene King IPA, but the Goat had only the nitrokeg version. I really should make more of an effort to switch to my Strongbow-swigging alter-ego in situations like this. Still, even that wouldn't have helped with the total utter deadness of both pubs. (Admittedly this is partly my fault for choosing a Monday afternoon for my visits. I mean, what kind of sad no-mates alky goes to pubs on her own on a Monday afternoon?)

Thankfully, the Wetherspoons Picture Palace came to the rescue. Lovely interior, excellent atmosphere, and there was a beer festival on. Marvellous.

Light for photography was generally vile, and almost everything I wanted to photograph had the sun behind it, but I managed to get a good shot of the terrifyingly-huge Enfield Cineworld. (That photo does not even begin to convey scale. Seriously, it's ginormous, and that's only the front third or so.)

Flickr photoset

Next up: From Ponders End station round the reservoir, finishing up in the Royal Oak for a pint and some dinner with any Enfield inhabitants I can persuade to join me, then home via Chingford Station.

Perl Survey results.

2007-11-13T18:31:29Z

Perl Survey results are out!

Would you like to guess what percentage of respondents were female?

View Poll: #1088012

(I'll provide the answer in a comment. The current results of this ongoing poll can be viewed here.)

Best TV series ever.

2007-11-08T04:21:02Z

Slightly along the lines of publicansdecoy's Arsehole of the Year competition, I want to find out what you lot think is the best TV series ever.

We start with nominations; please nominate here. Any TV series is eligible, whether it's shown in the UK, the USA, Wales, Brazil, whatever. Soaps, documentaries, cooking shows, current shows, shows that were last seen in the seventies. Everything that gets nominated will get entry into the final poll, unless there are more than 200 nominations, in which case some form of triage will take place.

The final poll will be posted during the weekend of 1-2 December 2007. It will be a radio button poll, because otherwise counting the votes would be tedious. Note: this means that in the final voting you'll only get to vote for one series. Voting will close some time during the weekend of 29-30 December 2007.

There is an extra competition to guess which series I think is the best ever. Go on, have a go.

View Poll: #1084913

Advent calendars.

2007-11-06T13:23:51Z

One of you lot was posting about an advent calendar exchange, where you make an advent calendar and post it off to someone, and someone else posts you one in return. Was it you, or do you know who it was? (I thought it might have been ghoti but it doesn't seem to have been.)