Yorkshire Dales (3) Music and Dancing

Some pictures and videos from last weekend

Dance workshop led by Katinka Kundler and Petter Johansson with Jon Holmén (fiddle) in the foreground

Trying out a Rättvik polska

Rapt attention from a couple of participants

The workshop leaders perform...

Willow Flutes

... are traditional Scandinavian instruments made by soaking willow branches on water. The pith and bark are then separated to leave a tube from which a very simple flute is made. They're very perishable so nowadays people make them out of plastic pipe (Wikipedia article)

Lady on the left holds a bass willow flute

Nyckelharpa

...another traditional Scandinavian instrument that swarm at this sort of event. Wikipedia article here

Ice in the sunset

Back in February, I did another trip to Cotswold Water Park and took this picture of the sun setting over some ice on one of the lakes.

Previous trip

Rhythm or Melody? (Yorkshire Dales (2))

I discovered something interesting about my dancing and the way I respond to music. At Scandimoot, I did the first couple of dance workshops without trouble. In fact, they were great, learned much about using various bits of my body, interaction with partners, etc.

 

In the third workshop, it all started to go wrong. I just couldn't find the rhythm of the dance in the music. The fiddle player seemed to be running up and down esoteric scales fairly randomly. Looking around, the other dancers seemed to coping OK.

After struggling for some time, I talked to the teacher. She understood straight away “Ah, that's Rättvik music!” (It's a place in Sweden). I also talked to the fiddler and verified what my ears had been telling me – the melody sometimes smeared the notes over the beat. Or completely off the beat, or missing altogether! Watching the  fiddler play, he tapped his foot in the usual 1_(no 2)_3 rhythm of Swedish Polska but the melody was usually somewhere else. 

 

Other participants tried to help. Suggestions included:

 

•           Following the fiddlers feet instead of his fiddle.
•          Running a metronome in my head

 

None of these really work for me.

 

This experience illuminated some discussions I've had from time to time about what's “good” dance music. I dance to the melody. It's not enough that there's a “good beat”. If I was tone deaf it would be a different story.

Yorkshire Dales (1)

Had a long weekend of Swedish dancing in Austwick at "Scandimoot". Lots of things to digest and blog so this first post is mainly pictures from the journey. More later!

This noble pile is Hornby Castle dating back to the C13. More info here

Next, Malham Tarn which is the highest lake in England and  one of only eight upland alkaline lakes in Europe - the pH going as high as 8.6. As you might expect, this means it's got lots of rare wildlife and the conservation people are all over it. Pretty though.

Malham Tarn from the West

The whole area is built on limestone as you can see on this derelict farm.

Swallow hole near Malham Tarn

This rock isn't as inherently porous as my local "oolitic" limestone so water drains through the cracks. Streams and rivers don't obey the usual rules - you know, come up at a charming spring, run along the surface and fall into the sea. Here, they are likely to fall down "swallow holes" and reemerge miles away. See right

Another swallow hole above Malham Cove. The river flows towards the camera before entering several holes near the bottom left

Sheep and lambs

Rocky path on the way to Malham Cove

Upper end of Malham Cove

Limestone pavement on the edge of Malham Cove

Available light photography

Took this in the back room of the "Fountain" in Gloucester during a music session. It was quite dark so the textures came out interesting.

Second Severn Crossing

Took these pictures one evening during late February 2012, Click to enlarge.

Different News

When I was a boy, I was never happy to accept the version of the news put out by the BBC or newspapers. I did what every self-respecting geek of the era did - ran a wire up a tree in the garden and plugged it in the aerial socket of a short-wave receiver.

It was amazing - I "travelled" the world.  I think the first station I heard was Radio Prague in what was then communist Czechoslovakia. As well as Radio Moscow, I listened many of the more obscure stations such as  Radio Pyongyang (North Korea) and learned useful insults such as "running dog of the imperialist paper tigers" . There were occasional slips in the English - I recall Radio Tirana (Albania) telling me about the poor treatment of the "Ab-Oranges" in Australia. "Western" broadcasters were around too such as the Voice Of America but they were less bizarre.

Nowadays, different slants on the news are still available via the ubiquitous World Wide Web, here's just a few interesting examples:

• Aljazeera has a wide range of stories covering the world. As you might expect, it's got a more "eastern" view but not to the point of strain.
• I first bought myself a copy of Pravda over 20 years ago on a trip to Moscow. Then it was a newspaper, in Russian and the joke was that "pravda" translated as "Truth". Now it's on-line and in English too.
• For those interested in the Greek view of what's happening in that troubled country, try Athens News
• North Korea is now on-line but in many ways, it hasn't changed it's tone at all - see here (There are a number of fake North Korea sites around but this one seems genuine - it has a .kp domain)
• For what seems to be a wide-ranging and fairly balanced news service, try Wikipedia's coyly named "Current events" portal.
• Finally, for news in English from one of our smaller European partners, try the Times of Malta

A Commercial

I first saw this advert at the cinema a couple of years ago. Unusually, the male character isn't an uncaring, beer swilling, sex-obsessed idiot. Obviously the evil "Patriarchal Society" is getting more cunning :)

Email and web monitoring laws (proposed UK)

This proposal does seem to be exceptionally silly. Any well-advised Bad Guy™ will be able to avoid it. The problem (for the “authorities”) is the diversity and rapid evolution of the services available on the Internet.

Standard email is not a great problem. It is handled in a fairly straightforward way using a handful of published protocols. (SMTP, IMAP, POP3, etc.). If you use an email program, those acronyms will almost certainly be involved “under the hood”.

If you use a web-based email service such as Google, Yahoo or Hotmail it's a bit harder to snoop. Such services tend to use secure protocols such as HTTPS. However, I'm going to ignore that layer of protection purely because it's possible that the authorities can defeat it. The problem is that the protocols used by web-mail services are diverse, often proprietary, unpublished and worst of all, frequently changing. This makes monitoring a major technical project.

The situation gets worse when you start to look at the many other messaging systems around. I'm thinking of services like Facebook that provide several ways for people to “talk” and the technical bits underneath are changing all the time. Another example is Ebay where a communication channel is provided between sellers and buyers.

To be sure, the snoops will probably have no difficulty proving that target A and target B both visited Ebay last week. But then, so did millions of other people. So the snoops would need to do some more technical work. Just for Ebay and then for all the other sites the Bad Guys might use. And there'd be endless maintenance as sites were “improved”.

There is one useful trade-off the monitors could use. They could not bother doing the detailed technical work on minority sites. Sure, the Bad Guys might use them but basic traffic analysis works better on them. If terrorist C uses obscure.com and so does terrorist D then it tends to suggest they may be communicating – although it's unlikely to be solid enough on its own for a jury