Private Thoughts Made Public

The BBC website has a section called “have your say”, where they ask a topical question and invite your comments. Today’s question is on the subject of “free schools”, an initiative set up by the new coalition government to allow individuals to set up their own schools and take their children out of the national education system. Here are some of the first comments left on the site:

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09:52am on 18 Jun 2010

And I thought the last government came out with some balmy ideas about how to improve the education system!

10:01am on 18 Jun 2010

so the tories are going to lets parents choose their school, and organise the buildoing and running of them ,in any other words its privatisation the tories favourite thing .get tid of all goverment responsabilities so they can blame others when it goe`s wrong ,will the school uniforems and equipment carry adverts .and the teachers will do as they please demanding large wages .but will the teachers be up to the standard the parents want and when the parents children have all left shools who will run them then .

10:04am on 18 Jun 2010

Do you believe the world is only 6000 years old?

Do you believe that fossil’s are God’s prasctical joke designed to trick you into eternal damnation?

Do you believe that everyone who doesn’t share your exaxct same religous principles is going to burn in hell?

Are you egearly awaiting the rapture so you can look down and watch the sinners gets their just come-uppence?

Now you can found your own school and make sure that a generation of children grow up to share your beliefs!

Sign up now!

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I’ve left all these comments as they were typed in by the original authors, and to be honest, I’m flabbergasted. If this is the state that literacy is in today, then all I can say is that the educational system we’ve had in place for the last 30 years or so has left a lot to be desired. I’ve no idea how old these commenters are, or what their backgrounds are, but let’s assume they were educated at different times, in different types of school, when different political parties were in power. This shows that neither the Conservatives nor Labour have put in place an educational system that works.

If state education has left people with this level of literacy, and the alternative is to let people have a go at it themselves, then I say bring on the free schools. They can’t be any worse than this, surely?

Here are a couple of stop motion animations (three, actually) my son and I made this afternoon using my digital camera and a demo version of an animation program. I think they’re very good!

Last week I bought some extension tubes for the camera off eBay. An extension tube is an attachment for an SLR camera that fits between the lens and the camera body, effectively making the lens longer. I bought the set for a mere £4, thinking if they didn’t work then it wasn’t exactly a waste of a lot of money.

I didn’t get around to playing with them for a few days, but the other night I set the camera up on the tripod and had a go. The tubes are just hollow plastic tubes, one has the same mount as the Nikon lenses, so you can attach it to the camera, another has the same mount as the camera body, so you can attach that one to the lens. The tubes all screw together, and you can put any or all of the other tubes in the middle to make the extension the length you want it to be.

Normally, the camera talks to the lens via a series of electrical connection points, but when using these tubes, those connections are lost, so the camera thinks the lens isn’t attached. This means that you lose all the automatic functions of the camera, and are forced to work in purely manual mode. Everything from shutter speed to aperture to focus was done manually.

So, with my expensive camera loaded up with its £4 extension tubes, mounted on its £1.50 tripod, and set into remote shutter mode, I started to take some pictures. The experiments I did were all indoors, with just the normal lighting in the room. I had to set the ISO to 1600 and use a three second exposure to get the pictures coming out even halfway decent, but once I managed to work that out, I was very impressed with the results! I looked around the room trying to find things to photograph, and set up a stack of dvd’s in front of the camera so the object I was photographing was level with the lens. This is why the first pictures I took were of the stack of dvd’s itself…

(click on each thumbnail to see a larger version of the image)

I then took a photo of the business end of an AA battery:

a safety pin:

The edge of a microfibre cleaning cloth:

A bar code:

and finanlly, a tape measure:

Here’s a picture of everything together so you can see them all at “actual scale” as it were:

I don’t know how often I’ll use the tubes, or if it’s practical to use them outdoors at all. With all the tubes on the camera the level of magnification is rather huge, and the objects I’ll be photographing like this will, by necessity, be tiny. I’ll do some more experiments soon with fewer tubes on the camera and see if I can take any photographs hand-held, but in the meantime I think these cheap tubes were a worthwhile investment!

I discovered a neat feature on my car this morning. If you’ve got the windscreen wipers on and put the car into reverse, it automatically puts the rear screen wiper on, and keeps it on as long as the car is in reverse gear. That’s one of the “so simple, it’s obvious” ideas, and something I never really noticed was missing on previous cars I’ve driven. I think I’ll notice it missing when I drive a different car from now on, though.

As a related issue, I’ve not been doing any motorway driving this week, having had the week off work, and if I drive carefully and don’t have to start and stop too often at traffic lights, I can average 64mpg – I’m still on the first tank of fuel and I’ve had the car nearly two weeks now.

I’m happy all over at the moment!