Blog
Merchants of Doubt
A book that I really need to read. Naomi Oreskes Professor of history and science studies, University of California—San Diego
November 4, 2025
Healthy Streets notes
HealthyStreets.com 10 indicators, 2 main Pedestrians from all walks of life People choose to walk, cycle and use public transport Easy to cross Shade and shelter Places to stop and rest Not too noisy People feel safe Things to see and do People feel relaxed Clean air 10 aspects of what it feels like on streets Evidence base of Clean air Easy to cross People feel safe Not too noisy Prioritising people first Easier to walk & cycle Whole systems change needed - spatial planning, transport, helath, policing, housing, environment Whole system change in London started - why not Ceredigion? Bike storage Free cycle skills training (for senior managment) SUDs! Engage communities. Different use for streets System change - Design, legislation, monitoring, management, communities, businesses Healthy Streets Score Green is healthy Yellow not so healthy Red unhealthy Healthy Streets Index - land use, street network, population density, pavement widths, traffic levels, air quality, noise Grasp the scale of the challenge Tools Healthy Streets Design Check spreadsheet - 15-30 Qualitative street assessment Household survey City Index Design tool https://surveys.healthystreets.com/
October 22, 2025
Independent observers?
I have a field trip to a poor part of town to look at their transport and I am feeling very… uncomfortable. the “Western individual”… is that featureless, rational observer, a disembodied eye, carefully scrubbed of any individual or social content… if the “Western individual” doesn’t exist, then what precisely is our point of comparison? Graeber, 2024. The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World, 1st ed. Penguin, London. pp28
October 14, 2025
Blog posts, now on Mastodon
I’m a huge fan of Mastodon, a federated, Open Source social media network, made up of a federation of instances (servers). I just moved to a new instance, as I’m not really doing #ForestGarden design for a living any more, and I moved to c.im, because I am a sucker for short names and because the übercool Radical Anthropology has an account there. One feature I haven’t used for a while is publishing blog posts to Mastodon. There is a service called MastoFeed which seems to do the trick. This is a blog post to find out!!
October 6, 2025
Geek noodling to remove folders from menu
I have an assets/templates/ folder, where I edit the Obsidian template for the Unique Note Creator plugin. However, the assets folder and the README file were appearing in the automagically created menus. I had to add: ignoreFiles: - 'README' - 'assets/' to the hugo.yaml config file.
October 5, 2025
Surfacing and connecting
I have tried so many times a variety of todo lists and methodologies, from Getting Things Done to Bullet Journals. Where I’m at now is a shelf full of A5 dotted journals, using Lunatask as a digital bin and a headful of threads. Yesterday I was at the launch of the Public Map Platform, which was incredibly useful for the Community Enterprise Agroforestry project I’m working on, and I was doodling and scribbling away. Not random thoughts exactly, more tangential, and I keep wanting to add them to a blog, with a minimal explanation, possibly with a hashtag, because it’ll be interesting to see how the ideas could surface and reconnect over time. Like a subconscious intellectual patina. So, here goes, “Write summary yesterday’s ideas”:
October 1, 2025
Salt doctor and island escape
Most days I’m confronted with a barrage of ideas, so much input. And mostly random. No.1, The Salt Professor. Ages ago, I listened Jim Al-Khalili’s The Life Scientific, and there was an episode with a professor who had dedicated his life to reducing the amount of salt in people‘s diets. His name is Graham Macgregor, and I just found out he died 4 weeks ago. His work has saved thousands of lives. Another thought that surfaced was a true story about a man in the 1930s who decided to escape from modern life and lived on a deserted island in the Pacific, only for it to become a key strategic site in the Pacific theatre in World War II.
September 25, 2025
Gantt charts are harder than they look
In my day job I said I would put everyone’s meta-tasks into a Gantt chart. Not too hard, I thought. There is a whole Markdown-esque language and Obsidian plugin called Markwhen but jeez, is it ever overkill. So, I’m back to Excel, and I really don‘t like Microsoft products, particularly the online Office365.
September 24, 2025
Graeber & Dennett said the same thing
One of my favourite quotes from David Graeber is: The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently. Graeber, D. 2024. The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World, pp8. 1st ed. London: Penguin And one of my favourite books is Daniel Dennett‘s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, which for me is that the world is inescapably full of possibility.
September 11, 2025